Buttermore, nor from Jarniman. That is to say,
the two former accepted invitations to grand dinners; the two latter
acknowledged contributions to funds in which they were interested; but
they had apparently grown to consider Mrs. Burman as an establishment,
one of our fixtures. On the other hand, there was nothing to be feared
from her. Lakelands feared nothing: the entry into Lakelands was decreed
for the middle of April. Those good creatures enclosed the poor woman
and nourished her on comfortable fiction. So the death of the member
for the South London borough (fifteen years younger than the veteran in
maladies) was not to be called premature, and could by no possibility
lead to an exposure of the private history of the candidate for his
vacant seat.

CHAPTER XL. AN EXPIATION

Nataly had fallen to be one of the solitary who have no companionship
save with the wound they nurse, to chafe it rather than try at healing.
So rational a mind as she had was not long in outliving mistaken
impressions; she could distinguish her girl's feeling, and her aim; she
could speak on the subject with Dartrey; and still her wound bled on.
Louise de Seilles comforted her partly, through an exaltation of Nesta.
Mademoiselle, however, by means of a change of tone and look when Dudley
Sowerby and Dartrey Fenellan were the themes, showed a too pronounced
preference of the more unstable one:--or rather, the man adventurous out
of the world's highways, whose image, as husband of such a daughter
as hers, smote the wounded mother with a chillness. Mademoiselle's
occasional thrill of fervency in an allusion to Dartrey, might have
tempted a suspicious woman to indulge suppositions, accounting for the
young Frenchwoman's novel tenderness to England, of which Nesta proudly,
very happily boasted. The suspicion proposed itself, and was rejected:
for not even the fever of an insane body could influence Nataly's
generous character, to let her moods divert and command her thoughts of
persons.

Her thoughts were at this time singularly lucid upon everything about
her; with the one exception of the reason why she had come to favour
Dudley, and how it was she had been smitten by that woman at Brighton
to see herself in her position altogether with the world's relentless,
unexamining hard eyes. Bitterness added, of Mrs. Marsett: She is made
an honest woman!--And there was a strain of the lower in Nataly, to
reproach the girl for causing the reflect