om Steynham. I cannot endure a second persecution.'

'But you have a world of packing, my dear.'

'An hour before breakfast will be sufficient for me.'

'In that case, we might be off early, as you say, and have part of the
Easter week in Rome.'

'Mr. Austin wishes it greatly, papa, though he has not mentioned it.'

'Austin, my darling girl, is not one of your impatient men who burst with
everything they have in their heads or their hearts.'

'Oh! but I know him so well,' said Cecilia, conjuring up that innocent
enthusiasm of hers for Mr. Austin as an antidote to her sharp suffering.
The next minute she looked on her father as the key of an enigma
concerning Seymour Austin, whom, she imagined, possibly she had not
hitherto known at all. Her curiosity to pierce it faded. She and her maid
were packing through the night. At dawn she requested her maid to lift
the window-blind and give her an opinion of the weather. 'Grey, Miss,'
the maid reported. It signified to Cecilia: no one roaming outside.

The step she was taking was a desperate attempt at a cure; and she
commenced it, though sorely wounded, with pity for Nevil's
disappointment, and a singularly clear-eyed perception of his aims and
motives.--'I am rich, and he wants riches; he likes me, and he reads my
weakness.'--Jealousy shook her by fits, but she had no right to be
jealous, nor any right to reproach him. Her task was to climb back to
those heavenly heights she sat on before he distracted her and drew her
down.

Beauchamp came to a vacated house that day.

CHAPTER XLVI

AS IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN FORESEEN

It was in Italy that Cecilia's maiden dreams of life had opened. She
hoped to recover them in Italy, and the calm security of a mind
untainted. Italy was to be her reviving air.

While this idea of a specific for her malady endured travelling at speed
to the ridges of the Italian frontier, across France--she simply
remembered Nevil: he was distant; he had no place in the storied
landscape, among the images of Art and the names of patient great men who
bear, as they bestow, an atmosphere other than earth's for those adoring
them. If at night, in her sleep, he was a memory that conducted her
through scenes which were lightnings, the cool swift morning of her
flight released her. France, too, her rival!--the land of France,
personified by her instinctively, though she had no vivid imaginative
gift, did not wound her with a poisoned dart.--'She knew