for detached musical jerks of
diabolical rapidity, that have to be snapped at with the punctuality
of the mosquito slayer, don't show your rounded lines to advantage,
and make you clench your teeth and glare horribly.

* * * * *

Our story is like the scherzo in one respect: it has to be given in
detached jerks--literary, not musical--and these jerks don't come at
any stated intervals at all. The music was bad enough--so Sally and
Laetitia thought--but the chronicle is more spasmodic still. However,
if you want to know its remaining particulars, you will have to brace
yourself up to tolerating an intermittent style. It is the only one
our means of collecting information admits of.

This little musical interlude, and the accidental chat of our two
young performers, gives us a kind of idea of what was the position
of things at Krakatoa Villa six months after Fenwick made his singular
reappearance in the life of Mrs. Nightingale. We shall rely on your
drawing all our inferences. There is only one belief of ours we need
to lay stress upon; it is that the lady's scheme to do all she could
to recapture and hold this man who had been her husband was no mere
slow suggestion of the course of events in that six months, but a
swift and decisive resolution--one that, if not absolutely made at
once, paused only in the making until she was quite satisfied that
the disappearance of Fenwick's past was an accomplished fact. Once
satisfied of that, he became to her simply the man she had loved
twenty years ago--the man who did not, could not, forgive her
what seemed so atrocious a wrong, but whom she could forgive the
unforgiveness of; and this all the more if she had come to know of the
ruinous effect her betrayal of him had had--must have had--upon his
after-life. He was this man--this very man--to all appearance with
a mysterious veil drawn, perhaps for ever, over the terrible close of
their brief linked life and its hideous cause--over all that she would
have asked and prayed should be forgotten. If only this oblivion could
be maintained!--that was her fear. If it could, what task could be
sweeter to her than to make him such amends as lay in her power for
the wrong she had done him--how faultfully, who shall say? And if, in
late old age, no dawn of memory having gleamed in his ruined mind, she
came to be able to speak to him and tell him his own story--the tale
of the wreck of his early years--would