the Continent! He can write. But it's all
unproductive-dead weight on the country, these fellows with their
writings! He says Beauchamp's praise of Miss Denham is quite deserved. He
tells me, that at great peril to herself--and she nearly had her arm
broken by a stone he saved Shrapnel from rough usage on the
election-day.'

'Hum!' Colonel Halkett grunted significantly.

'So I thought,' Mr. Tuckham responded. 'One doesn't want the man to be
hurt, but he ought to be put down in some way. My belief is he's a
Fire-worshipper. I warrant I would extinguish him if he came before me.
He's an incendiary, at any rate.'

'Do you think,' said Cecilia, 'that Captain Beauchamp is now satisfied
with his experience of politics?'

'Dear me, no,' said Mr. Tuckham. 'It's the opening of a campaign. He's
off to the North, after he has been to Sussex and Bucks. He's to be at it
all his life. One thing he shows common sense in. If I heard him once I
heard him say half-a-dozen times, that he must have money:--"I must have
money!" And so he must if he 's to head the Radicals. He wants to start a
newspaper! Is he likely to get money from his uncle Romfrey?'

'Not for his present plan of campaign.' Colonel Halkett enunciated the
military word sarcastically. 'Let's hope he won't get money.'

'He says he must have it.'

'Who is to stand and deliver, then?'

'I don't know; I only repeat what he says: unless he has an eye on my
Aunt Beauchamp; and I doubt his luck there, if he wants money for
political campaigning.'

'Money!' Colonel Halkett ejaculated.

That word too was in the heart of the heiress.

Nevil must have money! Could he have said it? Ordinary men might say or
think it inoffensively; Captain Baskelett, for instance: but not Nevil
Beauchamp.

Captain Baskelett, as she had conveyed the information to her father for
his comfort in the dumb domestic language familiar between them on these
occasions, had proposed to her unavailingly. Italian and English
gentlemen were in the list of her rejected suitors: and hitherto she had
seen them come and go, one might say, from a watchtower in the skies.
None of them was the ideal she waited for: what their feelings were,
their wishes, their aims, she had not reflected on. They dotted the
landscape beneath the unassailable heights, busy after their fashion,
somewhat quaint, much like the pigmy husbandmen in the fields were to the
giant's daughter, who had more curiosity than Cecilia. But