A suggestion of her mother’s coming down, was faintly spoken by one lady, echoed in a quaver by the other.

Nesta shook her head.  To quiet the kind souls, she entreated them to give their promise that they would invite her again.

Imagining the Hon. Dudley to have cast her off, both ladies embraced her:  not entirely yielding-up their hearts to her, by reason of the pernicious new ideas now in the world to sap our foundations of morality; which warned them of their duty to uphold mentally his quite justifiable behaviour, even when compassionating the sufferings of the guiltless creature loved by them.

CHAPTER XXXIV

CONTAINS DEEDS UNRELATED AND EXPOSITIONS OF FEELINGS

All through the afternoon and evening Skepsey showed indifference to meals by continuing absent:  and he was the one with whom Nesta would have felt at home; more at home than with her parents.  He and the cool world he moved in were a transparency of peace to her mind; even to his giving of some portion of it, when she had the dear little man present to her in a vivid image of a fish in a glass globe, wandering round and round, now and then shooting across, just as her Skepsey did:  he carried his head semihorizontally at his arrowy pace; plain to read though he was, he appeared, under that image created of him, animated by motives inducing to speculation.

She thought of him till she could have reproached him for not returning and helping her to get away from the fever of other thoughts:—­this anguish twisting about her parents, and the dreadful trammels of gratitude to a man afflictingly generous, the frown of congregated people.

The latter was the least of evils; she had her charges to bring against them for injustice:  uncited, unstirred charges, they were effective as a muffled force to sustain her:  and the young who are of healthy lively blood and clean conscience have either emotion or imagination to fold them defensively from an enemy world; whose power to drive them forth into the wilderness they acknowledge.  But in the wilderness their souls are not beaten down by breath of mortals; they burn straight flame there up to the parent Spirit.

She could not fancy herself flying thither;—­where to be shorn and naked and shivering is no hardship, for the solitude clothes, and the sole true life in us resolves to that steady flame;—­she was restrained by Dudley’s generosity, which held her fast to have the forgiveness for her uncommitted sin dashed in her face.  He surprised her; the unexpected quality in him seemed suddenly to have snared her fast:  and she did not obtain release after seeing behind it;—­seeing it, by the light of what she demanded, personal, shallow, a lover’s generosity.  So her keen intellect saw it; and her young blood (for the youthful are thus divided) thrilled in thinking it must be love!  The name of the sacred passion lifted it out of the petty cabin