int it,
he was delicate: her name must not be public.'

'Yes, yes, Dudley is without parallel as a gentleman,' said Victor. 'It
does not suit me to hear the word "indulgent." My dear, if you were down
there, you would discover that the talk was the talk of two or three
men seeing our girl ride by--and she did ride with a troop: why, we've
watched them along the parade, often. Clear as day how it happened! I'll
go down early to-morrow.'

He fancied Nataly was appeased. And even out of this annoyance, there
was the gain of her being won to favour Dudley's hitherto but tolerated
suit.

Nataly also had the fancy, that the calm following on her anguish, was
a moderation of it. She was kept strung to confide in her girl by the
recent indebtedness to her for words heavenly in the strengthening
comfort they gave. But no sooner was she alone than her torturing
perplexities and her abasement of the hours previous to Victor's coming
returned.

For a girl of Nesta's head could not be deceived; she had come home with
a woman's intelligence of the world, hard knowledge of it--a knowledge
drawn from foul wells, the unhappy mother imagined: she dreaded to probe
to the depth of it. She had in her wounded breast the world's idea, that
corruption must come of the contact with impurity.

Nataly renewed her cry of despair: 'The mother!--the daughter!'--her
sole revelation of the heart's hollows in her stammered speaking to
Victor.

She thanked heaven for the loneliness of her bed, where she could
repeat: 'The mother!--the daughter!' hearing the world's words:--the
daughter excused, by reason of her having such a mother; the mother
unpitied for the bruiting of her brazen daughter's name: but both alike
consigned to the corners of the world's dust-heaps. She cried out, that
her pride was broken. Her pride, her last support of life, had gone to
pieces. The tears she restrained in Victor's presence, were called on to
come now, and she had none. It might be, that she had not strength for
weeping. She was very weak. Rising from bed to lock her door against
Nesta's entry to the room on her return at night, she could hardly
stand: a chill and a clouding overcame her. The quitted bed seemed the
haven of a drifted wreck to reach.

Victor tried the handle of a locked door in the dark of the early winter
morning. 'The mother!--the daughter!' had swung a pendulum for some time
during the night in him, too. He would rather have been subjected to