perception of the
thoroughbred's contempt for the barriers of wattled sheep; and caught
the word 'guilt,' to hide the Philistine citizen's lapse, by relating
historically, in abridgement, the honest beauty of the passionate loves
of the two whom the world proscribed for honestly loving. There was no
guilt. He harped on the word, to erase the recollection of his first use
of it.

'Fiddle,' said Lady Grace. 'The thing happened. You have now to carry it
through. You require a woman's aid in a social matter. Rely on me, for
what I can do. You will see Dudley on Tuesday? I will write. Be plain
with him; not forgetting the gilding, I need not remark. Your Nesta has
no aversion?'

'Admires, respects, likes; is quite--is willing.'

'Good enough beginning.' She rose, for the atmosphere was heated, rather
heavy. 'And if one proves to be of aid, you'll own that a woman has her
place in the battle.'

The fair black-clad widow's quick and singular interwreathing of the
evanescent pretty pouts and frowns dimpled like the brush of the wind
on a sunny pool in a shady place; and her forehead was close below his
chin, her lips not far. Her apparel was attractively mourning.

Widows in mourning, when they do not lean over extremely to the Stygian
shore, with the complexions of the drugs which expedited the defunct
to the ferry, provoke the manly arm within reach of them to pluck their
pathetic blooming persons clean away from it. What of the widow who
visibly likes the living? Compassion; sympathy, impulse; and gratitude,
impulse again, living warmth; and a spring of the blood to wrestle
with the King of Terrors for the other poor harper's half-night
capped Eurydice; and a thirst, sudden as it is overpowering; and the
solicitude, a reflective solicitude, to put the seal on a thing and call
it a fact, to the astonishment of history; and a kick of our naughty
youth in its coffin; all the insurgencies of Nature, with her colonel of
the regiment absent, and her veering trick to drive two vessels at the
cross of a track into collision, combine for doing that, which is very
much more, and which affects us at times so much less than did the
pressure of a soft wedded hand by our own elsewhere pledged one. On
the contrary, we triumph, we have the rich flavour of the fruit for our
pains; we commission the historian to write in hieroglyphs a round big
fact.

The lady passed through the trial submitting, stiffening her shoulders,
and at the c