horizon, surely!

She bowed her head to heaven for forgiveness. The murderous hope stood
up, stood out in forms and pictures. There was one of a woman at her ease
at last in the reception of guests; contrasting with an ironic haunting
figure of the woman of queenly air and stature under a finger of scorn
for a bold-faced impostor. Nataly's lips twitched at the remembrance of
quaint whimpers of complaint to the Fates, for directing that a large
instead of a rather diminutive woman should be the social offender
fearing exposure. Majesty in the criminal's dock, is a confounding
spectacle. To the bosom of the majestic creature, all her glorious
attributes have become the executioner's implements. She must for her
soul's health believe that a day of release and exoneration approaches.

'Barmby!--if my dear girl would like him best,' Victor said, in tenderest
undertones, observing the shadowing variations of her face; and pierced
her cruelly, past explanation or understanding;--not that she would have
objected to the Rev. Septimus as officiating clergyman.

She nodded. Down rolled the first big tear.

We cry to women; Land, ho!--a land of palms after storms at sea; and at
once they inundate us with a deluge of eye-water.

'Half a minute, dear Victor, not longer,' Nataly said, weeping, near on
laughing over his look of wanton abandonment to despair at sight of her
tears. 'Don't mind me. I am rather like Fenellan's laundress, the tearful
woman whose professional apparatus was her soft heart and a cake of soap.
Skepsey has made his peace with you?'

Victor answered: 'Yes, yes; I see what he has been about. We're a mixed
lot, all of us-the best! You've noticed, Skepsey has no laugh: however
absurd the thing he tells you, not a smile!'

'But you trust his eyes; you look fathoms into them. Captain Dartrey
thinks him one of the men most in earnest of any of his country.'

'So Nataly of course thinks the same. And he's a worthy little
velocipede, as Fenellan calls him. One wishes Colney had been with us.
Only Colney!--pity one can't cut his talons for the space before they
grow again.'

Ay, and in the presence of Colney Durance, Victor would not have been so
encouraging, half boyishly caressing, with Dudley Sowerby! It was the
very manner to sow seed of imitativeness in the girl, devoted as she was
to her father. Nataly sighed, foreseeing evil, owning it a superstition,
feeling it a certainty. We are easily prophets, sure o