Mr. Fenellan has been his confidant.'

'My darling, we did wrong to let it go on, without speaking. You don't
know for certain yet?'

'It's a large estate, mama, and a big new house.'

Nataly's bosom sank. 'Ah me! here's misery! I ought to have known. And
too late now it has gone so far! But I never imagined he would be
building.'

She caught herself languishing at her toilette-glass, as, if her beauty
were at stake; and shut her eyelids angrily. To be looking in that
manner, for a mere suspicion, was too foolish. But Nesta's divinations
were target-arrows; they flew to the mark. Could it have been expected
that Victor would ever do anything on a small scale? O the dear little
lost lost cottage! She thought of it with a strain of the arms of
womanhood's longing in the unblessed wife for a babe. For the secluded
modest cottage would not rack her with the old anxieties, beset her with
suspicions. . . .

'My child, you won't possibly have time before the dinner-hour,' she said
to Nesta, dismissing her and taking her kiss of comfort with a short and
straining look out of the depths.

Those bitter doubts of the sentiments of neighbours are an incipient
dislike, when one's own feelings to the neighbours are kind, could be
affectionate. We are distracted, perverted, made strangers to ourselves
by a false position.

She heard his voice on a carol. Men do not feel this doubtful position as
women must. They have not the same to endure; the world gives them land
to tread, where women are on breaking seas. Her Nesta knew no more than
the pain of being torn from a home she loved. But now the girl was older,
and if once she had her imagination awakened, her fearful directness
would touch the spot, question, bring on the scene to-come, necessarily
to come, dreaded much more than death by her mother. But if it might be
postponed till the girl was nearer to an age of grave understanding, with
some knowledge of our world, some comprehension of a case that could be
pleaded!

He sang: he never acknowledged a trouble, he dispersed it; and in her
present wrestle with the scheme of a large country estate involving new
intimacies, anxieties, the courtship of rival magnates, followed by the
wretched old cloud, and the imposition upon them to bear it in silence
though they knew they could plead a case, at least before charitable and
discerning creatures or before heaven, the despondent lady could have
asked whether he was perfectly san