ble to
resume his military duties next month. Then she will return to me.'

'We propose!' rejoined Mr. Barmby.

Beholding the involuntary mercurial rogue-dimple he had started from a
twitch at the corner, of her lips, the good gentleman pursued: 'Can we
dare write our designs for the month to come? Ah!--I will say--Nesta!
give me the hope I beg to have. See the seriousness. You are at liberty.
That other has withdrawn his pretensions. We will not blame him. He
is in expectation of exalted rank. Where there is any shadow...!' Mr.
Barmby paused on his outroll of the word; but immediately, not intending
to weigh down his gentle hearer with the significance in it, resumed at
a yet more sonorous depth: 'He is under the obligation to his family;
an old, a venerable family. In the full blaze of public opinion! His
conduct can be palliated by us, too. There is a right and wrong in minor
things, independent of the higher rectitude. We pardon, we can partly
support, the worldly view.'

'There is a shadow?' said Nesta; and her voice was lurefully
encouraging.

He was on the footing where men are precipitated by what is within them
to blunder. 'On you--no. On you personally, not at all. No. It could not
be deemed so. Not by those knowing, esteeming--not by him who loves
you, and would, with his name, would, with his whole strength, envelop,
shield ... certainly, certainly not.'

'It is on my parents?' she said.

'But to me nothing, nothing, quite nought! To confound the innocent with
the guilty!... and excuses may exist. We know but how little we know!'

'It is on both my parents?' she said; with a simplicity that induced him
to reply: 'Before the world. But not, I repeat...'

The band-instruments behind the sheltering glass flourished on their
termination of a waltz.

She had not heeded their playing. Now she said:

'The music is over; we must not be late at lunch'; and she stood up and
moved.

He sprang to his legs and obediently stepped out:

'I shall have your answer to-day, this evening? Nesta!'

'Mr. Barmby, it will be the same. You will be kind to me in not asking
me again.'

He spoke further. She was dumb.

Had he done ill or well for himself and for her when he named the shadow
on her parents? He dwelt more on her than on himself: he would not have
wounded her to win the blest affirmative. Could she have been entirely
ignorant?--and after Dudley Sowerby's defection? For such it was: the
Rev. Stuart Rem