Her sensitive ear caught a change of tone in the directions she received. “Your father will say so and so: answer him with this and that.” Beauchamp supplied her with phrases. She was to renew and renew the attack; hammer as he did. Yesterday she had followed him: to-day she was to march beside him—hardly as an equal. Patience! was the word she would have uttered in her detection of the one frailty in his nature which this hurrying of her off her feet opened her eyes to with unusual perspicacity. Still she leaned to him sufficiently to admit that he had grounds for a deep disturbance of his feelings. He said: “I go to Dr. Shrapnel’s cottage, and don’t know how to hold up my head before Miss Denham. She confided him to me when she left for Switzerland!” There was that to be thought of, certainly. Colonel Halkett came round a box-bush and discovered them pacing together in a fashion to satisfy his paternal scrutiny. “I’ve been calling you several times, my dear,” he complained. “We start in seven minutes. Bustle, and bonnet at once. Nevil, I’m sorry for this business. Good-bye. Be a good boy, Nevil,” he murmured kindheartedly, and shook Beauchamp’s hand with the cordiality of an extreme relief in leaving him behind. The colonel and Mr. Romfrey and Beauchamp were standing on the hall-steps when Rosamund beckoned the latter and whispered a request for _that letter_ of Dr. Shrapnel’s. “It is for Miss Halkett, Nevil.” He plucked the famous epistle from his bulging pocketbook, and added a couple of others in the same handwriting. “Tell her, a first reading—it’s difficult to read at first,” he said, and burned to read it to Cecilia himself: to read it to her with his comments and explanations appeared imperative. It struck him in a flash that Cecilia’s counsel to him to quit Steynham for awhile was good. And if he went to Bevisham he would be assured of Dr. Shrapnel’s condition: notes and telegrams from the cottage were too much tempered to console and deceive him. “Send my portmanteau and bag after me to Bevisham,” he said to Rosamund, and announced to the woefully astonished colonel that he would have the pleasure of journeying in his company as far as the town. “Are you ready? No packing?” said the colonel. “It’s better to have your impediments in the rear of you, and march!” said Mr. Romfrey. Colonel Halkett declined to wait for anybody. He shouted for his daughter. The lady’s maid appeared, and then Cecilia with Rosamund. “We can’t entertain you, Nevil; we’re away to the island: I’m sorry,” said the colonel; and observing Cecilia’s face in full crimson, he looked at her as if he had lost a battle by the turn of events at the final moment. Mr. Romfrey handed Cecilia into the carriage. He exchanged a friendly squeeze with the colonel, and offered his hand to his nephew. Beauchamp passed him with a nod and “Good-bye, sir.” “Have ready at Holdesbury for the middle of the month,” said Mr. Romfrey, unruffled, and bowed to Cecilia.