so great. She wrote: 'Come, if sure that you sincerely wish to.'

Having fasted, she ate at lunch in her dressing-room, with some taste of
the food, haunted by an accusation of gluttony because of her eating at
all, and a vile confession, that she was enabled to eat, owing to the
receipt of Priscilla's empty letter: for her soul's desire was to be
doing a deed of expiation, and the macerated flesh seemed her assurance
to herself of the courage to make amends.--I must have some strength,
she said wearifully, in apology for the morsel consumed.

Nesta's being in the house with her, became an excessive irritation.
Doubts of the girl's possible honesty to speak a reptile truth under
question; amazement at her boldness to speak it; hatred of, the mouth
that could: and loathing of the words, the theme; and abomination of
herself for conjuring fictitious images to rouse real emotions; all ran
counterthreads, that produced a mad pattern in the mind, affrighting
to reason: and then, for its preservation, reason took a superrational
leap, and ascribed the terrible injustice of this last cruel stroke to
the divine scourge, recognized divine by the selection of the mortal
spot for chastisement. She clasped her breast, and said: It is mortal.
And that calmed her.

She said, smiling: I never felt my sin until this blow came! Therefore
the blow was proved divine. Ought it not to be welcomed?--and she
appearing no better than one of those, the leprous of the sex! And
brought to acknowledgement of the likeness by her daughter!

Nataly drank the poison distilled from her exclamations and was ice. She
had denied herself to Nesta's redoubled petition. Nesta knocking at the
door a third time and calling, tore the mother two ways: to have her
girl on her breast or snap their union in a word with an edge. She heard
the voice of Dartrey Fenellan.

He was admitted. 'No, dear,' she said to Nesta; and Nesta's, 'My own
mother,' consentingly said, in tender resignation, as she retired,
sprang a stinging tear to the mother's eyelids.

Dartrey looked at the door closing on the girl.

'Is it a very low woman?' Nataly asked him in a Church whisper, with a
face abashed.

'It is not,' said he, quick to meet any abruptness.

'She must be cunning.'

'In the ordinary way. We say it of Puss before the hounds.'

'To deceive a girl like Nesta!'

'She has done no harm.'

'Dartrey, you speak to a mother. You have seen the woman? She is?--ah!'

'