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 of being justified,
when the cleverness of schemes devoted to material ends appears most
delicately perfect. History, the tales of households, the tombstone, are
with us to inspire. In Nataly's bosom, the reproof of her inefficiency
for offeri