falsehood to enrich him and ruin Nevil,
papa?'

'My dear child, I'm sick to death of romantic fellows. I took Blackburn
for one of our solid young men. Why should he share his aunt's fortune?'

'You mean, why should Nevil have money?'

'Well, I do mean that. Besides, the story was not false as far as his
intentions went: he confessed it, and I ought to have put it in a
postscript. If Nevil wants money, let him learn to behave himself like a
gentleman at Steynham.'

'He has not failed.'

'I'll say, then, behave himself, simply. He considers it a point of
honour to get his uncle Everard to go down on his knees to Shrapnel. But
he has no moral sense where I should like to see it: none: he confessed
it.'

'What were his words, papa?'

'I don't remember words. He runs over to France, whenever it suits him,
to carry on there . . .' The colonel ended in a hum and buzz.

'Has he been to France lately?' asked Cecilia.

Her breath hung for the answer, sedately though she sat.

'The woman's father is dead, I hear,' Colonel Halkett remarked.

'But he has not been there?'

'How can I tell? He's anywhere, wherever his passions whisk him.'

'No!'

'I say, yes. And if he has money, we shall see him going sky-high and
scattering it in sparks, not merely spending; I mean living immorally,
infidelizing, republicanizing, scandalizing his class and his country.'

'Oh no!' exclaimed Cecilia, rising and moving to the window to feast her
eyes on driving clouds, in a strange exaltation of mind, secretly sure
now that her idea of Nevil's having gone over to France was groundless;
and feeling that she had been unworthy of him who strove to be 'worthier
of her, as he hoped to become.'

Colonel Halkett scoffed at her 'Oh no,' and called it woman's logic.

She could not restrain herself. 'Have you forgotten Mr. Austin, papa? It
is Nevil's perfect truthfulness that makes him appear worse to you than
men who are timeservers. Too many time-servers rot the State, Mr. Austin
said. Nevil is not one of them. I am not able to judge or speculate
whether he has a great brain or is likely to distinguish himself out of
his profession: I would rather he did not abandon it: but Mr. Austin said
to me in talking of him . . .'

'That notion of Austin's of screwing women's minds up to the pitch of
men's!' interjected the colonel with a despairing flap of his arm.

'He said, papa, that honestly active men in a country, who decline to
practise