-morrow. He knows:--it is over
the Clubs there; he will tell you, before a word to Nesta. Innocent, yes!
Mr. Sowerby has not to be assured of that. Ignorant of the character of
the dreadful woman? Ah, if I could ever in anything think her ignorant!
She frightens me. Mr. Sowerby is indulgent. He does me justice. My duty
to her--I must defend myself--has been my first thought. I said in my
prayers--she at least! . . . We have to see the more than common reasons
why she, of all girls, should--he did not hint it, he was delicate: her
name must not be public.'

'Yes, yes, Dudley is without parallel as a gentleman,' said Victor. 'It
does not suit me to hear the word "indulgent." My dear, if you were down
there, you would discover that the talk was the talk of two or three men
seeing our girl ride by--and she did ride with a troop: why, we've
watched them along the parade, often. Clear as day how it happened! I'll
go down early to-morrow.'

He fancied Nataly was appeased. And even out of this annoyance, there was
the gain of her being won to favour Dudley's hitherto but tolerated suit.

Nataly also had the fancy, that the calm following on her anguish, was a
moderation of it. She was kept strung to confide in her girl by the
recent indebtedness to her for words heavenly in the strengthening
comfort they gave. But no sooner was she alone than her torturing
perplexities and her abasement of the hours previous to Victor's coming
returned.

For a girl of Nesta's head could not be deceived; she had come home with
a woman's intelligence of the world, hard knowledge of it--a knowledge
drawn from foul wells, the unhappy mother imagined: she dreaded to probe
to the depth of it. She had in her wounded breast the world's idea, that
corruption must come of the contact with impurity.

Nataly renewed her cry of despair: 'The mother!--the daughter!'--her sole
revelation of the heart's hollows in her stammered speaking to Victor.

She thanked heaven for the loneliness of her bed, where she could repeat:
'The mother!--the daughter!' hearing the world's words:--the daughter
excused, by reason of her having such a mother; the mother unpitied for
the bruiting of her brazen daughter's name: but both alike consigned to
the corners of the world's dust-heaps. She cried out, that her pride was
broken. Her pride, her last support of life, had gone to pieces. The
tears she restrained in Victor's presence, were called on to come now,
and she had no