ent regrets. It hunted
all the saints in the calendar till their haloes top-sided on their
heads-her favourite St. Francis of Assisi excepted.

The doctor was called up from Bevisham next day, and pronounced her
bilious. He was humorous over Captain Beauchamp, who had gone to the
parents of the dead girl, and gathered the information that they were
a consumptive family, to vindicate Dr. Shrapnel. 'The very family to
require strong nourishment,' said the doctor.

Cecilia did not rest in her sick-room before, hunting through one book
and another, she had found arguments on the contrary side; a waste of
labour that heaped oppression on her chest, as with the world's weight.
Apparently one had only to be in Beauchamp's track to experience
that. She horrified her father by asking questions about consumption.
Homoeopathy, hydropathy,--the revolutionaries of medicine attracted
her. Blackburn Tuckham, a model for an elected lover who is not beloved,
promised to procure all sorts of treatises for her: no man could have
been so deferential to a diseased mind. Beyond calling her by her
Christian name, he did nothing to distress her with the broad aspect
of their new relations together. He and Mr. Austin departed from
Mount Laurels, leaving her to sink into an agreeable stupor, like one
deposited on a mudbank after buffeting the waves. She learnt that her
father had seen Captain Baskelett, and remembered, marvelling, how her
personal dread of an interview, that threatened to compromise her ideal
of her feminine and peculiar dignity, had assisted to precipitate her
where she now lay helpless, almost inanimate.

She was unaware of the passage of time save when her father spoke of
a marriage-day. It told her that she lived and was moving. The fear
of death is not stronger in us, nor the desire to put it off, than
Cecilia's shunning of such a day. The naming of it numbed her blood like
a snakebite. Yet she openly acknowledged her engagement; and, happily
for Tuckham, his visits, both in London and at Mount Laurels, were few
and short, and he inflicted no foretaste of her coming subjection to him
to alarm her.

Under her air of calm abstraction she watched him rigorously for some
sign of his ownership that should tempt her to revolt from her pledge,
or at least dream of breaking loose: the dream would have sufficed.
He was never intrusive, never pressing. He did not vex, because he
absolutely trusted to the noble loyalty which made