ight of the world on
her child; she would want inciting and strengthening, if one judged of
her capacity to meet the trial by her recent bearing; and how was he
to do it! He could not imagine himself encountering the startled,
tremulous, nascent intelligence in those pure brown darklashed eyes of
Nesta; he pitied the poor mother. Fancifully directing her to say this
and that to the girl, his tongue ran till it was cut from his heart and
left to wag dead colourless words.

The prospect of a similar business of exposition, certainly devolving
upon the father in treaty with the fortunate youth, gripped at his
vitals a minute, so intense was his pride in appearing woundless and
scarless, a shining surface, like pure health's, in the sight of men.
Nevertheless he skimmed the story, much as a lecturer strikes his wand
on the prominent places of a map, that is to show us how he arrived
at the principal point, which we are all agreed to find chiefly
interesting. This with Victor was the naming of Nesta's bridal
endowment. He rushed to it. 'My girl will have ten thousand a year
settled on her the day of her marriage.' Choice of living at Lakelands
was offered.

It helped him over the unpleasant part of that interview. At the
same time, it moved him to a curious contempt of the youth. He had
to conjure-up an image of the young man in person, to correct the
sentiment:--and it remained as a kind of bruise only half cured.

Mr. Dudley Sowerby was not one of the youths whose presence would
rectify such an abstract estimate of the genus pursuer. He now came
frequently of an evening, to practise a duet for flutes with Victor;--a
Mercadante, honeyed and flowing; too honeyed to suit a style that, as
Fenellan characterized it to Nataly, went through the music somewhat
like an inquisitive tourist in a foreign town, conscientious to get to
the end of the work of pleasure; until the notes had become familiar,
when it rather resembled a constable's walk along the midnight streets
into collision with a garlanded roysterer; and the man of order and
the man of passion, true to the measure though they were, seeming to
dissent, almost to wrangle, in their different ways of winding out the
melody, on to the last movement; which was plainly a question between
home to the strayed reveller's quarters or off to the lockup. Victor was
altogether the younger of the two. But his vehement accompaniment was
a tutorship; Mr. Sowerby improved; it was admit