‘Lakelands on fire?’ Dartrey murmured to Nesta; and she answered:  ’I should not be sorry.’

Nataly coldly asked her why she would not be sorry.

Dartrey interposed:  ‘I’m sure she thinks Lakelands worries her mother.’

‘That ranks low among the worries,’ Nataly sighed, opening the envelope.

Nesta touched her arm:  ’Mother! even before Captain Dartrey, if you will let me!’—­she turned to him:  ‘before . . .’ at the end of her breath she said:  ‘Dartrey Fenellan.  You shall see my whole heart, mother.’

Her mother looked from her at him.

‘Victor returns by the last train.  He telegraphs, that he dines with—­’ She handed the paper to Dartrey.

‘Marsett,’ he read aloud; and she flushed; she was angry with him for not knowing, that the name was a term of opprobrium flung at her.

‘It’s to tell you he has done what he thought good,’ said Dartrey.  ’In other words, as I interpret, he has completed his daughter’s work.  So we won’t talk about it till he comes.  You have no company this evening?’

’Oh! there is a pause to-night!  It’s nearly as unceasing as your brother Simeon’s old French lady in the ronde with her young bridegroom, till they danced her to pieces.  I do get now and then an hour’s repose,’ Nataly added, with a vision springing up of the person to whom the story had applied.

‘My dear, you are a good girl to call me Dartrey,’ the owner of the name said to Nesta.

Nataly saw them both alert, in the terrible manner peculiar to both, for the directest of the bare statements.  She could have protested, that her love of truth was on an equality with theirs; and certainly, that her regard for decency was livelier.  Pass the deficiency in a man.  But a girl who could speak, by allusion, of Mrs. Marsett—­of the existence of a Mrs. Marsett—­in the presence of a man:  and he excusing, encouraging:  and this girl her own girl;—­it seemed to her, that the world reeled; she could hardly acknowledge the girl; save under the penitential admission of her sin’s having found her out.

She sent Nesta to her room when they went upstairs to dress, unable to endure her presence after seeing her show a placid satisfaction at Dartrey’s nod to the request for him to sleep in the house that night.  It was not at all a gleam of pleasure, hardly an expression; it was a manner of saying, One drop more in my cup of good fortune! an absurd and an offensive exhibition of silly optimism of the young, blind that they are!

For were it known, and surely the happening of it would be known, that Dudley Sowerby had shaken off the Nesta of no name, who was the abominable Mrs. Marsett’s friend, a whirlwind with a trumpet would sweep them into the wilderness on a blast frightfuller than any ever heard.