the provident mother for Fredi!'

'Let our girl wait; don't hurry her mind to . . . She is happy with her
father and mother. She is in the happiest time of her life, before those
feelings distract.'

'If we see good fortune for her, we can't let it pass her.'

A pang of the resolution now to debate the case with Victor, which would
be of necessity to do the avoided thing and roll up the forbidden curtain
opening on their whole history past and prospective, was met in Nataly's
bosom by the more bitter immediate confession that she was not his match.
To speak would be to succumb; and shamefully after the effort; and
hopelessly after being overborne by him. There was not the anticipation
of a set contest to animate the woman's naturally valiant heart; he was
too strong: and his vividness in urgency overcame her in advance,
fascinated her sensibility through recollection; he fanned an
inclination, lighted it to make it a passion, a frenzied resolve--she
remembered how and when. She had quivering cause to remember the fateful
day of her step, in a letter received that morning from a married sister,
containing no word of endearment or proposal for a meeting. An
unregretted day, if Victor would think of the dues to others; that is,
would take station with the world to see his reflected position, instead
of seeing it through their self-justifying knowledge of the honourable
truth of their love, and pressing to claim and snatch at whatsoever the
world bestows on its orderly subjects.

They had done evil to no one as yet. Nataly thought that;
not-withstanding the outcry of the ancient and withered woman who bore
Victor Radnor's name: for whom, in consequence of the rod the woman had
used, this tenderest of hearts could summon no emotion. If she had it,
the thing was not to be hauled up to consciousness. Her feeling was, that
she forgave the wrinkled Malignity: pity and contrition dissolving in the
effort to produce the placable forgiveness. She was frigid because she
knew rightly of herself, that she in the place of power would never have
struck so meanly. But the mainspring of the feeling in an almost
remorseless bosom drew from certain chance expressions of retrospective
physical distaste on Victor's part;--hard to keep from a short utterance
between the nuptial two, of whom the unshamed exuberant male has found
the sweet reverse in his mate, a haven of heavenliness, to delight
in:--these conjoined with a woman's unspoken p