as of a fateful
power that might drag her down, disorder, discolour. But now she had
heard it: the word, the very word itself! in her own ears! addressed to
her! in a man's voice! The first utterance had been heard, and it was
over; the chapter of the book of bulky promise of the splendours and
mysteries;--the shimmering woods and bushy glades, and the descent of
the shape celestial, and the recognition--the mutual cry of affinity;
and overhead the crimson outrolling of the flag of beneficent
enterprises hand in hand, all was at an end. These, then, are the
deceptions our elders tell of! That masculine voice should herald a new
world to the maiden. The voice she had heard did but rock to ruin the
world she had been living in.

Mademoiselle prudently forbore from satirical remarks on his person or
on his conduct. Nesta had nothing to defend: she walked in a bald waste.

'Can I have been guilty of leading him to think...?' she said, in a tone
that writhed, at a second discussion of this hapless affair.

'They choose to think,' mademoiselle replied. 'It is he or another. My
dear and dearest, you have entered the field where shots fly thick,
as they do to soldiers in battle; and it is neither your fault nor any
one's, if you are hit.'

Nesta gazed at her, with a shy supplicating cry of 'Louise.'

Mademoiselle immediately answered the tone of entreaty. 'Has it happened
to me? I am of the age of eight and twenty; passable, to look at: yes,
my dear, I have gone through it. To spare you the questions tormenting
you, I will tell you, that perhaps our experience of our feelings comes
nigh on a kind of resemblance. The first gentleman who did me the honour
to inform me of his passion, was a hunchback.'

Nesta cried 'Oh!' in a veritable pang of sympathy, and clapped hands to
her ears, to shut out Mr. Barmby's boom of the terrific word attacking
Louise from that deformed one.

Her disillusionment became of the sort which hears derision. A girl of
quick blood and active though unregulated intellect, she caught at the
comic of young women's hopes and experiences, in her fear of it.

'My own precious poor dear Louise! what injustice there is in the world
for one like my Louise to have a hunchback to be the first...!'

'But, my dear, it did me no harm.'

'But if it had been known!'

'But it was known!'

Nesta controlled a shuddering: 'It is the knowledge of it in
ourselves--that it has ever happened;--you dear Louise, who