news of her relations with Mrs. Marsett reach him:--and
she would have to tell him. Would he not say: 'I have borne with
the things concerning your family. All the greater reason why I must
insist'--he would assuredly say he insisted (her humour caught at the
word, as being the very word one could foresee and clearly see him
uttering in a fit of vehemence) on her immediate abandonment of 'that
woman.'

And with Nesta's present enlightenment by dusky beams, upon her
parentage, she listened abjectly to Dudley, or the opinion of the
majority. Would he not say or think, that her clinging to Mrs. Marsett
put them under a kind of common stamp, or gave the world its option to
class them together?

These were among the ideas chasing in a head destined to be a
battle-field for the enrichment of a harvest-field of them, while the
girl's face was hidden on Dorothea's lap, and her breast heaved and
heaved.

She distressed them when she rose, by saying she must instantly see her
mother.

They saw the pain their hesitation inflicted, and Dorothea said: 'Yes,
dear; any day you like.'

'To-morrow--I must go to her to-morrow!'

A suggestion of her mother's coming down, was faintly spoken by one
lady, echoed in a quaver by the other.

Nesta shook her head. To quiet the kind souls, she entreated them to
give their promise that they would invite her again.

Imagining the Hon. Dudley to have cast her off, both ladies embraced
her: not entirely yielding-up their hearts to her, by reason of
the pernicious new ideas now in the world to sap our foundations of
morality; which warned them of their duty to uphold mentally his quite
justifiable behaviour, even when compassionating the sufferings of the
guiltless creature loved by them.

CHAPTER XXXIV. CONTAINS DEEDS UNRELATED AND EXPOSITIONS OF FEELINGS

All through the afternoon and evening Skepsey showed indifference to
meals by continuing absent: and he was the one with whom Nesta would
have felt at home; more at home than with her parents. He and the cool
world he moved in were a transparency of peace to her mind; even to his
giving of some portion of it, when she had the dear little man present
to her in a vivid image of a fish in a glass globe, wandering round and
round, now and then shooting across, just as her Skepsey did: he carried
his head semihorizontally at his arrowy pace; plain to read though he
was, he appeared, under that image created of him, animated by motive