ocked. She hoped those two would talk much, madly
if they liked, during dinner, that she might not be sensible, through any
short silence, of the ardour animating them: especially glowing in Nesta,
ready behind her quiet mask to come brazenly forth. But both of them were
mercilessly ardent; and a sickness of the fear, that they might fall on
her to capture her and hurry her along with them perforce of the allayed,
once fatal, inflammable element in herself, shook the warmth from her
limbs: causing her to say to herself aloud in a ragged hoarseness, very
strangely: Every thought of mine now has a physical effect on me!

They had not been two minutes together when she descended to them. Yet
she saw the girl's heart brimming, either with some word spoken to her or
for joy of an unmaidenly confession. During dinner they talked, without
distressful pauses. Whatever said, whatever done, was manifestly another
drop in Nesta's foolish happy cup. Could it be all because Dartrey
Fenellan countenanced her acquaintance with that woman? The mother had
lost hold of her. The tortured mother had lost hold of herself.

Dartrey in the course of the evening, begged to hear the contralto; and
Nataly, refusing, was astounded by the admission in her blank mind of the
truth of man's list of charges against her sex, starting from their
capriciousness for she could have sung in a crowded room, and she had now
a desire for company, for stolid company or giddy, an ocean of it. This
led to her thinking, that the world of serious money-getters, and feasts,
and the dance, the luxurious displays, and the reverential Sunday
service, will always ultimately prove itself right in opposition to
critics and rebels, and to any one vainly trying to stand alone: and the
thought annihilated her; for she was past the age of the beginning again,
and no footing was left for an outsider not self-justified in being where
she stood. She heard Dartrey's praise of Nesta's voice for tearing her
mother's bosom with notes of intolerable sweetness; and it was haphazard
irony, no doubt; we do not the less bleed for the accident of a shot.

At last, after midnight Victor arrived.

Nesta most impudently expected to be allowed to remain. 'Pray, go, dear,'
her mother said. Victor kissed his Fredi. 'Some time to-morrow,' said he;
and she forbore to beseech him.

He stared, though mildly, at sight of her taking Dartrey's hand for the
good-night and deliberately putting her li