or two. But I would cleanse my heart.'

'There is none purer.'

'Hush.'

Virginia spoke a more fervent word of praise of her sister, and had not
the hushing response to it. She heard the soft regular breathing. Her
own was in downy fellowship with it a moment later.

At the hour of nine, in genial daylight, sitting over the crumbs of his
hotel breakfast, Victor received a little note that bore the handwriting
of Dorothea Duvidney.

'Dear Victor, we are prepared to receive the child for a month.
In haste, before your train. Our love. D. and V.'

His face flashed out of cloud.

A more precious document had never been handed to him. It chased back to
midnight the doubt hovering over his belief in himself;--phrased to
say, that he was no longer the Victor Radnor known to the world. And it
extinguished a corpse-like recollection of a baleful dream in the night.
Here shone radiant witness of his being the very man; save for the spot
of his recent confusion in distinguishing his identity or in feeling
that he stood whole and solid.--Because of two mature maiden ladies?
Yes, because of two maiden ladies, my good fellow. And friend Colney,
you know the ladies, and what the getting round them for one's purposes
really means.

The sprite of Colney Durance had struck him smartly overnight. Victor's
internal crow was over Colney now. And when you have the optimist
and pessimist acutely opposed in a mixing group, they direct lively
conversations at one another across the gulf of distance, even of
time. For a principle is involved, besides the knowledge of the other's
triumph or dismay. The couple are scales of a balance; and not before
last night had Victor ever consented to think of Colney ascending while
he dropped low to graze the pebbles.

He left his hotel for the station, singing the great aria of the fourth
Act of the Favorita: neglected since that mighty German with his
Rienzi, and Tannhauser, and Tristan and Isolda, had mastered him, to
the displacement of his boyhood's beloved sugary -inis and -antes
and-zettis; had clearly mastered, not beguiled, him; had wafted him up
to a new realm, invigorating if severer. But now his youth would have
its voice. He travelled up to town with Sir Abraham Quatley and talked,
and took and gave hints upon City and Commercial affairs, while the
honeyed Italian of the conventional, gloriously animal, stress and
flutter had a revel in his veins, now and then mutedly ebullient a