of his conscience moved his tongue to say:
'As for guilt, if it were known . . . a couple of ascetics--absolutely!'
But this was assumed to be unintelligible; and it was merely the apology
to his conscience in communion with the sprite of a petticoated fair one
who was being subjected to tender little liberties, necessarily addressed
in enigmas. He righted immediately, under a perception of the
thoroughbred's contempt for the barriers of wattled sheep; and caught the
word 'guilt,' to hide the Philistine citizen's lapse, by relating
historically, in abridgement, the honest beauty of the passionate loves
of the two whom the world proscribed for honestly loving. There was no
guilt. He harped on the word, to erase the recollection of his first use
of it.

'Fiddle,' said Lady Grace. 'The thing happened. You have now to carry it
through. You require a woman's aid in a social matter. Rely on me, for
what I can do. You will see Dudley on Tuesday? I will write. Be plain
with him; not forgetting the gilding, I need not remark. Your Nesta has
no aversion?'

'Admires, respects, likes; is quite--is willing.'

'Good enough beginning.' She rose, for the atmosphere was heated, rather
heavy. 'And if one proves to be of aid, you'll own that a woman has her
place in the battle.'

The fair black-clad widow's quick and singular interwreathing of the
evanescent pretty pouts and frowns dimpled like the brush of the wind on
a sunny pool in a shady place; and her forehead was close below his chin,
her lips not far. Her apparel was attractively mourning.

Widows in mourning, when they do not lean over extremely to the Stygian
shore, with the complexions of the drugs which expedited the defunct to
the ferry, provoke the manly arm within reach of them to pluck their
pathetic blooming persons clean away from it. What of the widow who
visibly likes the living? Compassion; sympathy, impulse; and gratitude,
impulse again, living warmth; and a spring of the blood to wrestle with
the King of Terrors for the other poor harper's half-night capped
Eurydice; and a thirst, sudden as it is overpowering; and the solicitude,
a reflective solicitude, to put the seal on a thing and call it a fact,
to the astonishment of history; and a kick of our naughty youth in its
coffin; all the insurgencies of Nature, with her colonel of the regiment
absent, and her veering trick to drive two vessels at the cross of a
track into collision, combine for doing that, which