were shed on foul places? He clasped the
girl. Her smitten clear face, the face of the second sigh after torture,
bent him in devotion to her image.

The clasping and the worshipping were independent of personal ardours:
quaintly mixed with semi-paternal recollections of the little 'blue
butterfly' of the days at Craye. Farm and Creckholt; and he had heard of
Dudley Sowerby's pretensions to; her hand. Nesta's youthfulness cast
double age on him from the child's past. He pictured the child; pictured
the girl, with her look of solitariness of sight; as in the desolate wide
world, where her noble compassion for a woman had unexpectedly,
painfully, almost by transubstantiation, rack-screwed her to woman's
mind. And above sorrowful, holy were those eyes.

They held sway over Dartrey, and lost it some steps on; his demon temper
urgeing him to strike at Major Worrell, as the cause of her dismayed
expression. He was not the happier for dropping to his nature; but we
proceed more easily, all of us, when the strain which lifts us a foot or
two off our native level is relaxed.

CHAPTER XXXIII

A PAIR OF WOOERS

That ashen look of the rise out of death from one of our mortal wounds,
was caused by deeper convulsions in Nesta's bosom than Dartrey could
imagine.

She had gone for the walk with Mr. Barmby, reading the omen of his tones
in the request. Dorothea and Virginia would have her go. The clerical
gentleman, a friend of the Rev. Abram Posterley; and one who deplored
poor Mr. Posterley's infatuation; and one besides who belonged to Nesta's
musical choir in London: seemed a safe companion for the child. The grand
organ of Mr. Barmby's voice, too, assured them of a devout seriousness in
him, that arrested any scrupulous little questions. They could not
conceive his uttering the nonsensical empty stuff, compliments to their
beauty and what not, which girls hear sometimes from inconsiderate
gentlemen, to the having of their heads turned. Moreover, Nesta had
rashly promised her father's faithful servant Skepsey to walk, out with
him in the afternoon; and the ladies hoped she would find the morning's
walk to have been enough; good little man though Skepsey was, they were
sure. But there is the incongruous for young women of station on a
promenade.

Mr. Barmby headed to the pier. After pacing up and down between the briny
gulls and a polka-band, he made his way forethoughtfully to the
glass-sheltered seats fronting East: