any, he has--I'm sure you sing beautifully. When I hear
beautiful singing, even from a woman they tell tales of, upon my word,
it's true, I feel my sins all melting out of me and I'm new-made: I can't
bear Ned to speak. Would you one day, one afternoon, before the end of
next week?--it would do me such real good, you can't guess how much; if I
could persuade you! I know I'm asking something out of rules. For just
half an hour: I judge by your voice in talking. Oh! it would do me
good-good-good to hear you sing. There is a tuned piano--a cottage; I
don't think it sounds badly. You would not see any great harm in calling
on me? once!'

'No,' said Nesta. And it was her nature that projected the word. Her
awakened wits were travelling to her from a distance, and she had an
intimation of their tidings; and she could not have said what they were;
or why, for a moment, she hesitated to promise she would come. Her vision
of the reality of things was without written titles, to put the stamp of
the world on it. She felt this lady to be one encompassed and in the hug
of the elementary forces, which are the terrors to inexperienced pure
young women. But she looked at her, and dared trust those lips, those
eyes. She saw, through whatever might be the vessel, the spirit of the
woman; as the upper nobility of our brood are enabled to do in a crisis
mixed of moral aversion and sisterly sympathy, when nature cries to them,
and the scales of convention, the mud-spots of accident, even
naughtiness, even wickedness, all misfortune's issue, if we but see the
one look upward, fall away. Reason is not excluded from these blind
throbs of a blood that strikes to right the doings of the Fates. Nesta
did not err in her divination of the good and the bad incarnate beside
her, though both good and bad were behind a curtain; the latter sparing
her delicate senses, appealing to chivalry, to the simply feminine claim
on her. Reason, acting in her heart as a tongue of the flames of the
forge where we all are wrought, told her surely that the good
predominated. She had the heart which is at our primal fires when nature
speaks.

She gave the promise to call on Mrs. Marsett and sing to her.

'An afternoon? Oh! what afternoon?' she was asked, and she said: 'This
afternoon, if you like.'

So it was agreed: Mrs. Marsett acted violently the thrill of delight she
felt in the prospect.

The ladies Dorothea and Virginia, consulted, and pronounced the name o