e
orderly and sound; she had a good intellect. Now she more than half
defends him--a naval officer! good Lord!--for getting up in a public
room to announce that he 's a Republican, and writing heaps of mad
letters to justify himself. He's ruined in his profession: hopeless! He
can never get a ship: his career's cut short, he's a rudderless boat. A
gentleman drifting to Bedlam, his uncle calls him. I call his treatment
of Grancey Lespel anything but gentlemanly. This is the sort of fellow
my girl worships! What can I do? I can't interdict the house to him: it
would only make matters worse. Thank God, the fellow hangs fire somehow,
and doesn't come to me. I expect it every day, either in a letter or the
man in person. And I declare to heaven I'd rather be threading a Khyber
Pass with my poor old friend who fell to a shot there.'

'She certainly has another voice,' Mr. Austin assented gravely.

He did not look on Beauchamp as the best of possible husbands for
Cecilia.

'Let her see that you're anxious, Austin,' said the colonel. 'I'm her
old opponent in this affair. She loves me, but she's accustomed to think
me prejudiced: you she won't. You may have a good effect.'

'Not by speaking.'

'No, no; no assault: not a word, and not a word against him. Lay the
wind to catch a gossamer. I've had my experience of blowing cold, and
trying to run her down. He's at Shrapnel's. He'll be up here to-day, and
I have an engagement in the town. Don't quit her side. Let her fancy you
are interested in some discussion--Radicalism, if you like.'

Mr. Austin readily undertook to mount guard over her while her father
rode into Bevisham on business.

The enemy appeared.

Cecilia saw him, and could not step to meet him for trouble of heart. It
was bliss to know that he lived and was near.

A transient coldness following the fit of ecstasy enabled her to swin
through the terrible first minutes face to face with him.

He folded her round like a mist; but it grew a problem to understand why
Mr. Austin should be perpetually at hand, in the garden, in the woods,
in the drawing-room, wheresoever she wakened up from one of her trances
to see things as they were.

Yet Beauchamp, with a daring and cunning at which her soul exulted, and
her feminine nature trembled, as at the divinely terrible, had managed
to convey to her no less than if they had been alone together.

His parting words were: 'I must have five minutes with your father
to-mo