THE next day Mrs. Campion and Cecilia were seated under the veranda. They were both ostensibly employed on two several pieces of embroidery, one intended for a screen, the other for a sofa-cushion; but the mind of neither was on her work.

MRS. CAMPION.—“Has Mr. Chillingly said when he means to take leave?”

CECILIA.—“Not to me. How much my dear father enjoys his conversation!”

MRS. CAMPION.—“Cynicism and mockery were not so much the fashion among young men in your father’s day as I suppose they are now, and therefore they seem new to Mr. Travers. To me they are not new, because I saw more of the old than the young when I lived in London, and cynicism and mockery are more natural to men who are leaving the world than to those who are entering it.”

CECILIA.—“Dear Mrs. Campion, how bitter you are, and how unjust! You take much too literally the jesting way in which Mr. Chillingly expresses himself. There can be no cynicism in one who goes out of his way to make others happy.”

MRS. CAMPION.—“You mean in the whim of making an ill-assorted marriage between a pretty village flirt and a sickly cripple, and settling a couple of peasants in a business for which they are wholly unfitted.”

CECILIA.—“Jessie Wiles is not a flirt, and I am convinced that she will make Will Somers a very good wife, and that the shop will be a great success.”

MRS. CAMPION.—“We shall see. Still, if Mr. Chillingly’s talk belies his actions, he may be a good man, but he is a very affected one.”

CECILIA.—“Have I not heard you say that there are persons so natural that they seem affected to those who do not understand them?”

Mrs. Campion raised her eyes to Cecilia’s face, dropped them again over her work, and said, in grave undertones,—“Take care, Cecilia.”

“Take care of what?”

“My dearest child, forgive me; but I do not like the warmth with which you defend Mr. Chillingly.”

“Would not my father defend him still more warmly if he had heard you?”

“Men judge of men in their relations to men. I am a woman, and judge of men in their relations to women. I should tremble for the happiness of any woman who joined her fate with that of Kenelm Chillingly.”

“My dear friend, I do not understand you to-day.”

“Nay; I did not mean to be so solemn, my love. After all, it is nothing to us whom Mr. Chillingly may or may not marry. He is but a passing visitor, and, once gone, the chances are that we may not see him again for years.”

Thus speaking, Mrs. Campion again raised her eyes from her work, stealing a sidelong glance at Cecilia; and her mother-like heart sank within her, on noticing how suddenly pale the girl had become, and how her lips quivered. Mrs. Campion had enough knowledge of life to feel aware that she had committed a grievous blunder. In that earliest stage of virgin affection, when a girl is unconscious of more than a certain vague interest in one man which distinguishes him from others in her thoughts,—if she hears him unjustly disparaged, if some warning against him is implied, if the probability that he will never be more to her than a passing acquaintance is forcibly obtruded on her,—suddenly that vague interest, which might otherwise have faded away with many another girlish fancy, becomes arrested, consolidated; the quick pang it occasions makes her involuntarily, and for the first time, question herself, and ask, “Do I love?” But when a girl of a nature so delicate as that of Cecilia Travers can ask herself the question, “Do I love?” her very modesty, her very shrinking from acknowledging that any power over her thoughts for weal or for woe can be acquired by a man, except through the sanction of that love which only becomes divine in her eyes when it is earnest and pure and self-devoted, makes her prematurely disposed to answer “yes.” And when a girl of such a nature in her own heart answers “yes” to such a question, even if she deceive herself at the moment, she begins to cherish the deceit till the belief in her love becomes a reality. She has adopted a religion, false or true, and she would despise herself if she could be easily converted.

Mrs. Campion had so contrived that she had forced that question upon Cecilia, and she feared, by the girl’s change of countenance, that the girl’s heart had answered “yes.”