A remark or two passed among the company upon her pretty face.

Nataly murmured to Colney:  ‘Is there anything of Dartrey’s wife?’

‘Dead,’ he answered.

‘When?’

‘Months back.  I had it from Simeon.  You didn’t hear?’

She shook her head.  Her ears buzzed.  If he had it from Simeon Fenellan, Victor must have known it.

Her duties of hostess were conducted with the official smile.

As soon as she stood alone, she dropped on a chair, like one who has taken a shot in the heart, and that hideous tumult of wild cries at her ears blankly ceased.  Dartrey, Victor, Nesta, were shifting figures of the might-have-been for whom a wretched erring woman, washed clean of her guilt by death, in a far land, had gone to her end:  vainly gone:  and now another was here, a figure of wood, in man’s shape, conjured up by one of the three, to divide the two others; likely to be fatal to her or to them:  to her, she hoped, if the choice was to be:  and beneath the leaden hope, her heart set to a rapid beating, a fainter, a chill at the core.

She snatched for breath.  She shut her eyes, and with open lips, lay waiting; prepared to thank the kindness about to hurry her hence, out of the seas of pain, without pain.

Then came sighs.  The sad old servant in her bosom was resuming his labours.

But she had been near it—­very near it?  A gush of pity for Victor, overwhelmed her hardness of mind.

Unreflectingly, she tried her feet to support her, and tottered to the door, touched along to the stairs, and descended them, thinking strangely upon such a sudden weakness of body, when she would no longer have thought herself the weak woman.  Her aim was to reach the library.  She sat on the stairs midway, pondering over the length of her journey:  and now her head was clearer; for she was travelling to get Railway-guides, and might have had them from the hands of a footman, and imagined that she had considered it prudent to hide her investigation of those books:  proofs of an understanding fallen backward to the state of infant and having to begin our drear ascent again.

A slam of the kitchen stair-door restored her.  She betrayed no infirmity of footing as she walked past Arlington in the hall; and she was alive to the voice of Skepsey presently on the door-steps.  Arlington brought her a note.

Victor had written:  ’My love, I dine with Blathenoy in the City, at the Walworth.  Business.  Skepsey for clothes.  Eight of us.  Formal.  A thousand embraces.  Late.’

Skepsey was ushered in.  His wife had expired at noon, he said; and he postured decorously the grief he could not feel, knowing that a lady would expect it of him.  His wife had fallen down stone steps; she died in hospital.  He wished to say, she was no loss to the country; but he was advised within of the prudence of abstaining from comment and trusting to his posture, and he squeezed a drop of conventional sensibility out of it, and felt improved.