of rules.
For just half an hour: I judge by your voice in talking. Oh! it would do
me good-good-good to hear you sing. There is a tuned piano--a cottage; I
don't think it sounds badly. You would not see any great harm in calling
on me? once!'

'No,' said Nesta. And it was her nature that projected the word. Her
awakened wits were travelling to her from a distance, and she had an
intimation of their tidings; and she could not have said what they
were; or why, for a moment, she hesitated to promise she would come. Her
vision of the reality of things was without written titles, to put the
stamp of the world on it. She felt this lady to be one encompassed
and in the hug of the elementary forces, which are the terrors to
inexperienced pure young women. But she looked at her, and dared trust
those lips, those eyes. She saw, through whatever might be the vessel,
the spirit of the woman; as the upper nobility of our brood are enabled
to do in a crisis mixed of moral aversion and sisterly sympathy, when
nature cries to them, and the scales of convention, the mud-spots of
accident, even naughtiness, even wickedness, all misfortune's issue, if
we but see the one look upward, fall away. Reason is not excluded from
these blind throbs of a blood that strikes to right the doings of the
Fates. Nesta did not err in her divination of the good and the bad
incarnate beside her, though both good and bad were behind a curtain;
the latter sparing her delicate senses, appealing to chivalry, to the
simply feminine claim on her. Reason, acting in her heart as a tongue of
the flames of the forge where we all are wrought, told her surely that
the good predominated. She had the heart which is at our primal fires
when nature speaks.

She gave the promise to call on Mrs. Marsett and sing to her.

'An afternoon? Oh! what afternoon?' she was asked, and she said: 'This
afternoon, if you like.'

So it was agreed: Mrs. Marsett acted violently the thrill of delight she
felt in the prospect.

The ladies Dorothea and Virginia, consulted, and pronounced the name
of Marsett to be a reputable County name. 'There was a Leicestershire
baronet of the name of Marsett.' They arranged to send their
button-blazing boy at Nesta's heels. Mrs. Marsett resided in a
side-street not very distant from the featureless but washed and orderly
terrace of the glassy stare at sea.

CHAPTER XXIX. SHOWS ONE OF THE SHADOWS OF THE WORLD CROSSING A VIRGIN'S
MIND

Nasta