e of walking back
in winter weather with her father, struck her as ambiguous: either a
jealous foolish mother's device, or that of a weak man beating about
for protection. But the woman of the positive world soon read to the
contrary; helped a little by the man, no doubt. She read rather too much
to the contrary, and took the pedestrian girl for perfect simplicity in
her tastes, when Nesta had so far grown watchful as to feel relieved by
the lady's departure. Her mother, without sympathy for the lady, was too
great of soul for jealousy. Victor had his Nataly before him at a hint
from Lady Grace: and he went somewhat further than the exact degree
when affirming, that Nataly could not scheme, and was incapable of
suspecting.--Nataly could perceive things with a certain accuracy: she
would not stoop to a meanness. 'Plot? Nataly?' said he, and shrugged.
In fact, the void of plot, drama, shuffle of excitement, reflected upon
Nataly. He might have seen as tragic as ever dripped on Stage, had he
looked.

But the walk Westward with his girl, together with pride in a daughter
who clove her way through all weathers, won his heart to exultation. He
told her: 'Fredi does her dada so much good'; not telling her in what,
or opening any passage to the mystery of the man he was. She was trying
to be a student of life, with her eyes down upon hard earth, despite
of her winged young head; she would have compassed him better had he
dilated in sublime fashion; but he baffled her perusal of a man of
power by the simpleness of his enjoyment of small things coming in his
way;--the lighted shops, the crowd, emergence from the crowd, or the
meeting near midwinter of a soft warm wind along the Embankment, and
dark Thames magnificently coroneted over his grimy flow. There is no
grasping of one who quickens us.

His flattery of his girl, too, restored her broken feeling of personal
value; it permeated her nourishingly from the natural breath of him that
it was.

At times he touched deep in humaneness; and he set her heart leaping on
the flash of a thought to lay it bare, with the secret it held, for his
help. That was a dream. She could more easily have uttered the words
to Captain Dartrey, after her remembered abashing holy tremour of
the vision of doing it and casting herself on noblest man's
compassionateness; and her imagined thousand emotions;--a rolling music
within her, a wreath of cloudglory in her sky;--which had, as with
virgins it m