He says he must have it.«
    »Who is to stand and deliver, then?«
    »I don't know; I only repeat what he says: unless he has an eye on my Aunt
Beauchamp; and I doubt his luck there, if he wants money for political
campaigning.«
    »Money!« Colonel Halkett ejaculated.
    That word too was in the heart of the heiress.
    Nevil must have money! Could he have said it? Ordinary men might say or
think it inoffensively; Captain Baskelett, for instance: but not Nevil
Beauchamp.
    Captain Baskelett, as she had conveyed the information to her father for his
comfort in the dumb domestic language familiar between them on these occasions,
had proposed to her unavailingly. Italian and English gentlemen were in the list
of her rejected suitors: and hitherto she had seen them come and go, one might
say, from a watchtower in the skies. None of them was the ideal she waited for:
what their feelings were, their wishes, their aims, she had not reflected on.
They dotted the landscape beneath the unassailable heights, busy after their
fashion, somewhat quaint, much like the pigmy husbandmen in the fields were to
the giant's daughter, who had more curiosity than Cecilia. But Nevil Beauchamp
had compelled her to quit her lofty station, pulled her low as the littlest of
women that throb and flush at one man's footstep: and being well able to read
the nature and aspirations of Captain Baskelett, it was with the knowledge of
her having been proposed to as heiress of a great fortune that she chanced to
hear of Nevil's resolve to have money. If he did say it! And was anything
likelier? was anything unlikelier? His foreign love denied to him, why, now he
devoted himself to money: money - the last consideration of a man so
single-mindedly generous as he! But he must have money to pursue his contest!
But would he forfeit the truth in him for money for any purpose?
    The debate on this question grew as incessant as the thought of him.
    Was it not to be supposed that the madness of the pursuit of his political
chimaera might change his character?
    She hoped he would not come to Mount Laurels, thinking she should esteem him
less if he did; knowing that her defence of him, on her own behalf, against
herself, depended now on an esteem lodged perhaps in her wilfulness. Yet if he
did not come, what an Arctic world!
    He came on a November afternoon when the woods glowed, and no sun. The day
