sion of the scene
at Moorsedge. She did her best to feel an omen and sound it, in his
question 'whether the yearly increasing army of the orderly annuitants
and their parasites does not demonstrate the proud old country as a
sheath for pith rather than of the vital run of sap.'

Perhaps it was patriotic to inquire; and doubtless she was the weakest
of women; she could follow no thought; her heart was beating blindly
beside Victor, hopeing for the refusal painful to her through his
disappointment.

'You think me foolish,' she made answer to one of Colney's shrugs; 'and
it has come to that pitch with me, that I cannot be sensible of a merit
except in being one with him--obeying, is the word. And I have never yet
known him fail. That terrible Lakelands wears a different look to me,
when I think of what he can do; though I would give half my days to
escape it.'

She harped on the chord of feverish extravagance; the more hateful to
Colney because of his perceiving, that she simulated a blind devotedness
to stupefy her natural pride; and he was divided between stamping on her
for an imbecile and dashing at Victor for a maniac. But her situation
rendered her pitiable. 'You will learn tomorrow what Victor has done,'
he said, and thought how the simple words carried the bitterness.

That was uttered within a few minutes of midnight, when the ladies of
Moorsedge themselves, after an exhausting resistance to their dearest
relative, were at the hall-door of the house with Victor, saying the
good-night, to which he responded hurriedly, cordially, dumbly, a
baffled man. They clasped hands. Miss Dorothea said:

'You, Victor, always.' Miss Virginia said: 'You will be sure of
welcome.' He walked out upon the moonless night; and for lack of any
rounded object in the smothering darkness to look at, he could nowhere
take moorings to gather himself together and define the man who had
undergone so portentous a defeat. He was glad of quarters at an hotel, a
solitary bed, absence from his Nataly.

For their parts, the ladies were not less shattered. They had no triumph
in their victory: the weight of it bore them down. They closed, locked,
shot the bolts and fastened the chain of the door. They had to be
reminded by the shaking of their darling dog Tasso's curly silky coat,
that he had not taken his evening's trot to notify malefactors of his
watchfulness and official wrath at sound of footfall or a fancied one.
Without consultation, th