“If you would accept Nevil’s word!” she murmured.
“Not where women are concerned!”
He left her with this remark, which found no jealous response in her heart, yet ranged over certain dispersed inflammable grains, like a match applied to damp powder; again and again running in little leaps of harmless firm keeping her alive to its existence, and surprising her that it should not have been extinguished.
Beauchamp presented himself rather late in the afternoon, when Mr. Austin and Blackburn Tuckham were sipping tea in Cecilia’s boudoir with that lady, and a cousin of her sex, by whom she was led to notice a faint discoloration over one of his eyes, that was, considering whence it came, repulsive to compassion. A blow at a Radical meeting! He spoke of Dr. Shrapnel to Tuckham, and assuredly could not complain that the latter was unsympathetic in regard to the old man’s health, though when he said, “Poor old man! he fears he will die!” Tuckham rejoined: “He had better make his peace.”
“He fears he will die, because of his leaving Miss Denham unprotected,” said Beauchamp.
“Well, she’s a good-looking girl: he’ll be able to leave her something, and he might easily get her married, I should think,” said Tuckham.
“He’s not satisfied with handing her to any kind of man.”
“If the choice is to be among Radicals and infidels, I don’t wonder. He has come to one of the tests.”
Cecilia heard Beauchamp speaking of a newspaper. A great Radical Journal, unmatched in sincerity, superior in ability, soon to be equal in power, to the leader and exemplar of the lucre-Press, would some day see the light.
“You’ll want money for that,” said Tuckham.