too! Off you go.'

A battery was opened on that wall of composite.

'Ah, well,' said Victor. 'But I may have to beg your help, as to the
so-called promise to stand at the altar. I don't mention it upstairs.'

He went to Nataly's room.

She was considerately treated, and was aware of being dandled, that she
might have sleep.

She consented to it, in a loathing of the topic.--Those women invade
us--we cannot keep them out! was her inward cry: with a reverberation of
the unfailing accompaniment: The world holds you for one of them!

Victor tasked her too much when his perpetual readiness to doat upon
his girl for whatever she did, set him exalting Nesta's conduct. She
thought: Was Nesta so sympathetic with her mother of late by reason of a
moral insensibility to the offence?

This was her torture through the night of a labouring heart, that
travelled to one dull shock, again and again repeated:--the apprehended
sound, in fact, of Dudley Sowerby's knock at the street door. Or
sometimes a footman handed her his letter, courteously phrased to
withdraw from the alliance. Or else he came to a scene with Nesta, and
her mother was dragged into it, and the intolerable subject steamed
about her. The girl was visioned as deadly. She might be indifferent to
the protection of Dudley's name. Robust, sanguine, Victor's child, she
might--her mother listened to a devil's whisper--but no; Nesta's aim was
at the heights; she was pure in mind as in body. No, but the world would
bring the accusation; and the world would trace the cause: Heredity,
it would say. Would it say falsely? Nataly harped on the interrogation
until she felt her existence dissolving to a dark stain of the earth,
and she found herself wondering at the breath she drew, doubting that
another would follow, speculating on the cruel force which keeps us to
the act of breathing.--Though I could draw wild blissful breath if I
were galloping across the moors! her worn heart said to her youth: and
out of ken of the world, I could regain a portion of my self-esteem.
Nature thereat renewed her old sustainment with gentle murmurs, that
were supported by Dr. Themison's account of the virtuous married lady
who chafed at the yoke on behalf of her sex, and deemed the independent
union the ideal. Nataly's brain had a short gallop over moorland. It
brought her face to face with Victor's girl, and she dropped once more
to her remorse in herself and her reproaches of Nesta. The girl