r
a mate--and good Lord! how are they to know before it's too late!--they
haven't a choice except to play tricks or jump to the deuce or sit and
"drape in blight," as Colney has it; though his notion of the optional
marriages, broken or renewed every seven years!--if he means it. You
never know, with him. It sounds like another squirt of savage irony.
It's donkey nonsense, eh?'

'The very hee-haw of nonsense,' Fenellan acquiesced.

'Come, come; read your Scriptures; donkeys have shown wisdom,' Victor
said, rather leaning to the theme of a fretfulness of women in the legal
yoke. 'They're donkeys till we know them for prophets. Who can tell!
Colney may be hailed for one fifty years hence.'

Fenellan was not invited to enter the house, although the loneliness
of his lodgeings was known, and also, that he played whist at his Club.
Victor had grounds for turning to him at the door and squeezing his
hand warmly, by way of dismissal. In ascribing them to a weariness at
Fenellan's perpetual acquiescence, he put the cover on them, and he
stamped it with a repudiation of the charge, that Colney's views upon
the great Marriage Question were the 'very hee-haw of nonsense.' They
were not the hee-haw; in fact, viewing the host of marriages, they were
for discussion; there was no bray about them. He could not feel them to
be absurd while Mrs. Burman's tenure of existence barred the ceremony.
Anything for a phrase! he murmured of Fenellan's talk; calling him, Dear
old boy, to soften the slight.

Nataly had not seen Fenellan or heard from Dartrey; so she continued to
be uninformed of her hero's release; and that was in the order of happy
accidents. She had hardly to look her interrogation for the news; it
radiated. But he stated such matter-of-course briefly. 'The good ladies
are ready to receive our girl.'

Her chagrin resolved to a kind of solace of her draggled pride, in the
idea, that he who tamed everybody to submission, might well have command
of her.

The note, signed D. and V., was shown.

There stood the words. And last night she had been partly of the opinion
of Colney Durance. She sank down among the unreasoning abject;--not this
time with her perfect love of him, but with a resistance and a dubiety
under compression. For she had not quite comprehended why Nesta should
go. This readiness of the Duvidney ladies to receive the girl, stopped
her mental inquiries.

She begged for a week's delay; 'before the parting'; as