meeting Mr. Blackburn Tuckham: and how she could have known that Mr.
Tuckham would be there, Mrs. Devereux could not tell, for it was, Louise
assured Cecilia, purely by chance that he and Mr. Lydiard were present:
but the countess obtained an interview with him alone, and Mr. Tuckham
came from it declaring it to have been more terrible than any he had
ever been called upon to endure. The object of the countess was to
persuade him to renounce his bride.

Louise replied to the natural inquiry--'Upon what plea?' with a
significant evasiveness. She put her arms round Cecilia's neck: 'I trust
you are not unhappy. You will get no release from him.'

'I am not unhappy,' said Cecilia, musically clear to convince her
friend.

She was indeed glad to feel the stout chains of her anchor restraining
her when Lady Romfrey talked of Nevil; they were like the safety of
marriage without the dreaded ceremony, and with solitude to let her
weep. Bound thus to a weaker man than Blackburn Tuckham, though he had
been more warmly esteemed, her fancy would have drifted away over
the deeps, perhaps her cherished loyalty would have drowned in her
tears--for Lady Romfrey tasked it very severely: but he from whom she
could hope for no release, gave her some of the firmness which her
nature craved in this trial.

From saying quietly to her: 'I thought once you loved him,' when
alluding to Nevil, Lady Romfrey passed to mournful exclamations, and by
degrees on to direct entreaties. She related the whole story of Renee
in England, and appeared distressed with a desperate wonderment at
Cecilia's mildness after hearing it. Her hearer would have imagined that
she had no moral sense, if it had not been so perceptible that the
poor lady's mind was distempered on the one subject of Nevil Beauchamp.
Cecilia's high conception of duty, wherein she was a peerless flower of
our English civilization, was incommunicable: she could practise, not
explain it. She bowed to Lady Romfrey's praises of Nevil, suffered her
hands to be wrung, her heart to be touched, all but an avowal of her
love of him to be wrested from her, and not the less did she retain her
cold resolution to marry to please her father and fulfil her pledge. In
truth, it was too late to speak of Renee to her now. It did not beseem
Cecilia to remember that she had ever been a victim of jealousy; and
while confessing to many errors, because she felt them, and gained a
necessary strength from them--in