I must bear it. I may say the
story is false. With your hand in mine I would swear it.'

'Let it be forgotten,' said Cecilia, surprised and shaken to think that
her situation required further explanations; fascinated and unnerved by
simply hearing him. 'We are now--we are walking away from the house.'

'Do you object to a walk with me?'

They had crossed the garden plot and were at the gate of the park
leading to the Western wood. Beauchamp swung the gate open. He cast a
look at the clouds coming up from the South-west in folds of grey and
silver.

'Like the day of our drive into Bevisham!--without the storm behind,'
he said, and doated on her soft shut lips, and the mild sun-rays of
her hair in sunless light. 'There are flowers that grow only in certain
valleys, and your home is Mount Laurels, whatever your fancy may be for
Italy. You colour the whole region for me. When you were absent, you
were here. I called here six times, and walked and talked with you.'

Cecilia set her face to the garden. Her heart had entered on a course of
heavy thumping, like a sapper in the mine.

Pain was not unwelcome to her, but this threatened weakness.

What plain words could she use? If Mr. Tuckham had been away from the
house, she would have found it easier to speak of her engagement;
she knew not why. Or if the imperative communication could have been
delivered in Italian or French, she was as little able to say why it
should have slipped from her tongue without a critic shudder to arrest
it. She was cold enough to revolve the words: betrothed, affianced,
plighted: and reject them, pretty words as they are. Between the
vulgarity of romantic language, and the baldness of commonplace, it
seemed to her that our English gives us no choice; that we cannot be
dignified in simplicity. And for some reason, feminine and remote, she
now detested her 'hand' so much as to be unable to bring herself to the
metonymic mention of it. The lady's difficulty was peculiar to sweet
natures that have no great warmth of passion; it can only be indicated.
Like others of the kind, it is traceable to the most delicate of
sentiments, and to the flattest:--for Mr. Blackburn's Tuckham's figure
was (she thought of it with no personal objection) not of the graceful
order, neither cavalierly nor kingly: and imagining himself to say, 'I
am engaged,' and he suddenly appearing on the field, Cecilia's whole
mind was shocked in so marked a way did he contrast wit