ou laugh?'

'Do I laugh?' said Cecilia.

'We should all know the world, my dear, and you are a strong head. The
knowledge is only dangerous for fools. And if romance is occasionally
ridiculous, as I own it can be, humdrum, I protest, 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 c