comes of the pair.

This burning Nesta, Victor's daughter, tempered by Nataly's milder blood,
was a girl in whom the hard shocks of the knowledge of life, perforce of
the hardness upon pure metal, left a strengthening for generous
imagination. She did not sit to brood on her injured senses or set them
through speculation touching heat; they were taken up and consumed by the
fire of her mind. Nor had she leisure for the abhorrences, in a heart all
flowing to give aid, and uplift and restore. Self was as urgent in her as
in most of the young; but the gift of humour, which had previously
diverted it, was now the quick feeling for her sisterhood, through the
one piteous example she knew; and broadening it, through her insurgent
abasement on their behalf, which was her scourged pride of sex. She but
faintly thought of blaming the men whom her soul besought for justice,
for common kindness, to women. There was the danger, that her aroused
young ignorance would charge the whole of the misery about and abroad
upon the stronger of those two: and another danger, that the vision of
the facts below the surface would discolour and disorder her views of
existence. But she loved, she sprang to, the lighted world; and she had
figures of male friends, to which to cling; and they helped in animating
glorious historical figures on the world's library-shelves or under yet
palpitating earth. Promise of a steady balance of her nature, too, was
shown in the absence of any irritable urgency to be doing, when her bosom
bled to help. Beyond the resolve, that she would not abandon the woman
who had made confession to her, she formed no conscious resolutions. Far
ahead down her journey of the years to come, she did see muffled things
she might hope and would strive to do. They were chrysalis shapes. Above
all, she flew her blind quickened heart on the wings of an imaginative
force; and those of the young who can do that, are in their blood
incorruptible by dark knowledge, irradiated under darkness in the mind.
Let but the throb be kept for others. That is the one secret, for
redemption; if not for preservation.

Victor descended on his marine London to embrace his girl, full of
regrets at Fredi's absence from the great whirl 'overhead,' as places of
multitudinous assembly, where he shone, always appeared to him. But it
was not to last long; she would soon be on the surface again! At the
first clasp of her, he chirped some bars of her song. He cha