slough, when they see
her writhing as in her ugliest old throes. If they have learnt of
Nature's priest to respect her, they will less distrust those rare
daughters of hers who are moved by her warmth to lift her out of slime.
It is by her own live warmth that it has to be done: cold worship at a
niche in the wall will not do it.--Well, there is an index, for the
enlargement of your charity.

But facts were Dudley's teachers. Physically, morally, mentally, he read
the world through facts; that is to say, through the facts he
encountered: and he was in consequence foredoomed to a succession of
bumps; all the heavier from his being, unlike the horned kind, not
unimpressible by the hazy things outside his experience. Even at his
darkest over Nesta, it was his indigestion of the misconduct of her
parents, which denied to a certain still small advocate within him the
right to raise a voice: that good fellow struck the attitude for
pleading, and had to be silent; for he was Instinct; at best a stammering
speaker in the Court of the wigged Facts. Instinct of this Nesta Radnor's
character would have said a brave word, but for her deeds bearing witness
to her inheritance of a lawlessly adventurous temperament.

What to do? He was no nearer to an answer when the wintry dusk had fallen
on the promenading crowds. To do nothing, is the wisdom of those who have
seen fools perish. Facts had not taught him, that the doing nothing, for
a length of days after the first shock he sustained, was the reason of
how it came that Nesta knitted closer her acquaintance with the
'agreeable lady' she mentioned in her letter to Cronidge. Those excellent
counsellors of a mercantile community gave him no warnings, that the
'masterly inactive' part, so greatly esteemed by him for the conduct of
public affairs, might be perilous in dealings with a vivid girl: nor a
hint, that when facts continue undigested, it is because the sensations
are as violent as hysterical females to block them from the
understanding. His Robin Goodfellow instinct tried to be serviceable at a
crux of his meditations, where Edith Averst's consumptive brothers waved
faded hands at her chances of inheriting largely. Superb for the chances:
but what of her offspring? And the other was a girl such as the lusty
Dame Dowager of fighting ancestors would have signalled to the heir of
the House's honours for the perpetuation of his race. No doubt: and the
venerable Dame (beautiful in he