tertain London and wife;--our friends, in short; with some, what we
have to call, satellites. You inspect the house and grounds
to-morrow--sure to be fair. Put aside all but the pleasant recollections
of Craye and Creckholt. We start on a different footing. Really nothing
can be simpler. Keeping your town-house, you are now and then in
residence at Lakelands, where you entertain your set, teach them to feel
the charm of country life: we have everything about us; could have had
our own milk and cream up to London the last two months. Was it very
naughty?--I should have exploded my surprise! You will see, you will see
to-morrow.'

Nataly nodded, as required. 'Good news from the mines?' she said.

He answered: 'Dartrey is--yes, poor fellow! Dartrey is confident, from
the yield of stones, that the value of our claim counts in a number of
millions. The same with the gold. But gold-mines are lodgeings, not
homes.'

'Oh, Victor! if money . . . ! But why did you say "poor fellow" of
Dartrey Fenellan?'

'You know how he's . . .'

'Yes, yes,' she said hastily. 'But has that woman been causing fresh
anxiety?'

'And Natata's chief hero on earth is not to be named a poor fellow,' said
he, after a negative of the head on a subject they neither of them liked
to touch.

Then he remembered that Dartrey Fenellan was actually a lucky fellow; and
he would have mentioned the circumstance confided to him by Simeon, but
for a downright dread of renewing his painful fit of envy. He had also
another, more distant, very faint idea, that it had better not be
mentioned just yet, for a reason entirely undefined.

He consulted his watch. The maid had come in for the robeing of her
mistress. Nataly's mind had turned to the little country cottage which
would have given her such great happiness. She raised her eyes to him;
she could not check their filling; they were like a river carrying
moonlight on the smooth roll of a fall.

He loved the eyes, disliked the water in them. With an impatient, 'There,
there!' and a smart affectionate look, he retired, thinking in our old
satirical vein of the hopeless endeavour to satisfy a woman's mind
without the intrusion of hard material statements, facts. Even the best
of women, even the most beautiful, and in their moments of supremest
beauty, have this gross ravenousness for facts. You must not expect to
appease them unless you administer solids. It would almost appear that
man is exclusively imagina