When he rose to take his leave, Cecilia said, “Must you go to Itchincope on Wednesday, Nevil?”
Colonel Halkett added: “I don’t think I would go to Lespel’s if I were you. I rather suspect Seymour Austin will be coming on Wednesday, and that’ll detain me here, and you might join us and lend him an ear for an evening.”
“I have particular reasons for going to Lespel’s; I hear he wavers toward a Tory conspiracy of some sort,” said Beauchamp.
The colonel held his tongue.
The untiring young candidate chose to walk down to Bevisham at eleven o’clock at night, that he might be the readier to continue his canvass of the borough on Monday morning early. He was offered a bed or a conveyance, and he declined both; the dog-cart he declined out of consideration for horse and groom, which an owner of stables could not but approve.
Colonel Halkett broke into exclamations of pity for so good a young fellow so misguided.
The night was moonless, and Cecilia, looking through the window, said whimsically, “He has gone out into the darkness, and is no light in it!”
Certainly none shone. She however carried a lamp that revealed him footing on with a wonderful air of confidence, and she was rather surprised to hear her father regret that Nevil Beauchamp should be losing his good looks already, owing to that miserable business of his in Bevisham. She would have thought the contrary, that he was looking as well as ever.
“He dresses just as he used to dress,” she observed.
The individual style of a naval officer of breeding, in which you see neatness trifling with disorder, or disorder plucking at neatness, like the breeze a trim vessel, had been caught to perfection by Nevil Beauchamp, according to Cecilia. It presented him to her mind in a cheerful and a very undemocratic aspect, but in realizing it, the thought, like something flashing black, crossed her—how attractive such a style must be to a Frenchwoman!