test, is everlastingly so.
By-the-by, I should have told you that Captain Beauchamp was one hundred
and ninety below Captain Baskelett when the state of the poll was handed
to me. The gentleman driving with your father compared the Liberals to a
parachute cut away from the balloon. Is he army or navy?'

'He is a barrister, and some cousin of Captain Beauchamp.'

'I should not have taken him for a Beauchamp,' said Mrs. Lespel; and,
resuming her worldly sagacity, 'I should not like to be in opposition to
that young man.'

She seemed to have a fancy unexpressed regarding Mr. Tuckham. Reminding
herself that she might be behind time at Itchincope, where the guests
would be numerous that evening, and the song of triumph loud, with
Captain Baskelett to lead it, she kissed the young lady she had
unintentionally been torturing so long, and drove away.

Cecilia hoped it was not true. Her heart sank heavily under the belief
that it was. She imagined the world abusing Nevil and casting him out,
as those electors of Bevisham had just done, and impulsively she pleaded
for him, and became drowned in criminal blushes that forced her to
defend herself with a determination not to believe the dreadful story,
though she continued mitigating the wickedness of it; as if, by a
singular inversion of the fact, her clear good sense excused, and it
was her heart that condemned him. She dwelt fondly on an image of the
'gallant and handsome Colonel Richard Beauchamp,' conjured up in her
mind from the fervour of Mrs. Lespel when speaking of Nevil's father,
whose chivalry threw a light on the son's, and whose errors, condoned
by time, and with a certain brilliancy playing above them, interceded
strangely on behalf of Nevil.

CHAPTER XXVII. A SHORT SIDELOOK AT THE ELECTION

The brisk Election-day, unlike that wearisome but instructive canvass
of the Englishman in his castle vicatim, teaches little; and its
humours are those of a badly managed Christmas pantomime without a
columbine--old tricks, no graces. Nevertheless, things hang together so
that it cannot be passed over with a bare statement of the fact of the
Liberal-Radical defeat in Bevisham: the day was not without fruit in
time to come for him whom his commiserating admirers of the non-voting
sex all round the borough called the poor dear commander. Beauchamp's
holiday out of England had incited Dr. Shrapnel to break a positive
restriction put upon him by Jenny Denham, and actively