before the volume closes.
Her fatigue of sleeplessness plunged her into the period of poke-bonnets
and peaky hats to admire him; giving her the kind of sweetness we may
imagine ourselves to get in the state of tired horse munching hay. If she
had gone to her bed with a noble or simply estimable plain image of one
of her friends in her heart, to sustain it, she would not have been thus
abject. Skepsey's discoloured eye, and Captain Dartrey's behaviour behind
it, threw her upon Dudley's generosity, as being the shield for an
outcast. Girls, who see at a time of need their ideal extinguished in its
appearing tarnished, are very much at the disposal of the pressing
suitor. Nesta rose in the black winter morn, summoning the best she could
think of to glorify Dudley, that she might not feel so doomed.

According to an agreement overnight, she went to the bedroom of Dorothea
and Virginia, to assure them of her having slept well, and say the
good-bye to them and their Tasso. The little dog was the growl of a
silken ball in a basket. His mistresses excused him, because of his being
unused to the appearance of any person save Manton in their bedroom.
Dorothea, kissing her, said: 'Adieu, dear child; and there is home with
us always, remember. And, after breakfast, however it may be,
you will, for our greater feeling of security, have--she has our
orders--Manton--your own maid we consider too young for a guardian--to
accompany you. We will not have it on our consciences, that by any
possibility harm came to you while you were under our charge. The good
innocent girl we received from the hands of your father, we return to
him; we are sure of that.'

Nesta said: 'Mr. Sowerby promised he would come.'

'However it may be,' Dorothea repeated her curtaining phrase.

Virginia put in a word of apology for Tasso's temper he enjoyed
ordinarily a slumber of half an hour's longer duration. He was, Dorothea
feelingly added, regularity itself. Virginia murmured: 'Except once!' and
both were appalled by the recollection of that night. It had,
nevertheless, caused them to reperuse the Rev. Stuart Rem's published
beautiful sermon ON DIRT; the words of which were an antidote to the
night of Tasso in the nostrils of Mnemosyne; so that Dorothea could reply
to her sister, slightly by way of a reproval, quoting Mr. Stuart Rem at
his loftiest: '"Let us not bring into the sacred precincts Dirt from the
roads, but have a care to spread it where it is a