
days as a certainty.
    She said: »Canvassing should not be neglected now.«
    Her hostility was confused by what she had done to save him from annoyance,
while his behaviour to his cousin Cecil increased her respect for him. She
detected a pathetic meaning in his mention of the word home; she mused on his
having called her beautiful: whither was she hurrying? Forgetful of her horror
of his revolutionary ideas, forgetful of the elevation of her own, she thrilled
secretly on hearing it stated by the jubilant young Tories at Mount Laurels, as
a characteristic of Beauchamp, that he was clever in parrying political thrusts,
and slipping from the theme; he who with her gave out unguardedly the thoughts
deepest in him. And the thoughts! - were they not of generous origin? Where so
true a helpmate for him as the one to whom his mind appealed? It could not be so
with the Frenchwoman. Cecilia divined a generous nature by generosity, and set
herself to believe that in honour he had not yet dared to speak to her from the
heart, not being at heart quite free. She was at the same time in her remains of
pride cool enough to examine and rebuke the weakness she succumbed to in now
clinging to him by that which yesterday she hardly less than loathed, still
deeply disliked.
 

                                 Chapter XXIII

                                  Tourdestelle

On the part of Beauchamp, his conversation with Cecilia during the drive into
Bevisham opened out for the first time in his life a prospect of home; he had
felt the word in speaking it, and it signified an end to the distractions
produced by the sex, allegiance to one beloved respected woman, and also a basis
of operations against the world. For she was evidently conquerable, and once
matched with him would be the very woman to nerve and sustain him. Did she not
listen to him? He liked her resistance. That element of the barbarous which went
largely to form his emotional nature was overjoyed in wresting such a woman from
the enemy, and subduing her personally. She was a prize. She was a splendid
prize, cut out from under the guns of the fort. He rendered all that was due to
his eminently good cause for its part in so signal a success, but individual
satisfaction is not diminished by the thought that the individual's discernment
selected the cause thus beneficent to him.
    Beauchamp's meditations were diverted by the sight of the coast of France
dashed in rain-lines across a weed-strewn sea. The three days granted him by
Renée were over, and it scarcely troubled him that he should be behind the time;
