ay be
comprehensible to the topsy-turvy.'

Victor rubbed hands. It was he who filled Colney's bag of satiric spite.
In addition to the downright lunacy of the courting of country society,
by means of the cajolements witnessed this day, a suspicion that Victor
was wearing a false face over the signification--of Jarniman's visit
and meant to deceive the trustful and too-devoted loving woman he seemed
bound to wreck, irritated the best of his nature. He had a resolve to
pass an hour with the couple, and speak and insist on hearing plain
words before the night had ended. But Fenellan took it out of him.
Victor's show of a perfect contentment emulating Pempton's, incited
Colney to some of his cunning rapier-thrusts with his dancing adversary;
and the heat which is planted in us for the composition: of those cool
epigrams, will not allow plain words to follow. Or, handing him over to
the police of the Philistines, you may put it, that a habit of assorting
spices will render an earnest simplicity distasteful. He was invited
by Nataly to come home with them; her wish for his presence, besides
personal, was moved by an intuition, that his counsel might specially
benefit them. He shrugged; he said he had work at his chambers.

'Work!' Victor ejaculated: he never could reach to a right comprehension
of labour, in regard to the very unremunerative occupation of
literature. Colney he did not want, and he let him go, as Nataly
noticed, without a sign of the reluctance he showed when the others,
including Fenellan, excused themselves.

'So! we're alone?' he said, when the door of the hall had closed
on them. He kept Nesta talking of the success of the day until she,
observing her mother's look, simulated the setting-in of a frenzied
yawn. She was kissed, and she tripped to her bed.

'Now we are alone,' Nataly said.

'Well, dear, and the day was, you must own... ' he sought to trifle with
her heavy voice; but she recalled him: 'Victor!' and the naked anguish
in her cry of his name was like a foreign world threatening the one he
filled.

'Ah, yes; that man, that Jarniman. You saw him, I remember. You
recollected him?--stouter than he was. In her service ever since. Well,
a little drop of bitter, perhaps: no harm, tonic.'

'Victor, is she very ill?'

'My love, don't feel at your side: she is ill, ill, not the extreme
case: not yet: old and ill. I told Skepsey to give the man refreshment:
he had to do his errand.'

'What? why