hat the poor man might now serve permanently to check the
more dreaded applicant: a proof that her ordinary reflectiveness was
blunted.

Nataly acknowledged, after rallying Victor for coming to have his
weakness condoned, a justice in his counter-accusation, of a loss of her
natural cheerfulness, and promised amendment, with a steely smile, that
his lips mimicked fondly; and her smile softened. To strengthen the dear
soul's hopes, he spoke, as one who had received the latest information,
of Dr. Themison and surgeons; little conscious of the tragic depths he
struck or of the burden he gave her heart to bear. Her look alarmed him.
She seemed to be hugging herself up to the tingling scalp, and was in a
moment marble to sight and touch. She looked like the old engravings of
martyrs taking the bite of the jaws of flame at the stake.

He held her embraced, feeling her body as if it were in the awful grip
of fingers from the outside of life.

The seizure was over before it could be called ominous. When it was once
over, and she had smiled again and rebuked him for excessive anxiety,
his apprehensions no longer troubled him, but subsided sensationally
in wrath at the crippled woman who would not obey the dictate of her
ailments instantly to perish and spare this dear one annoyance.

Subsequently, later than usual, he performed his usual mental penance
for it. In consequence, the wrath, and the wish, and the penitence,
haunted him, each swelling to possession of him in turn; until they
united to head a plunge into retrospects; which led to his reviewing the
army of charges against Mrs. Burman.

And of this he grew ashamed, attributing it to the morbid indulgence in
reflection: a disease never afflicting him anterior to the stupid fall
on London Bridge. He rubbed instinctively for the punctilio-bump, and
could cheat his fancy to think a remainder of it there, just below,
half an inch to the right of, the spot where a phrenologist, invited by
Nataly in old days, had marked philo-progenitiveness on his capacious
and enviable cerebrum. He knew well it was a fancy. But it was a fact
also, that since the day of the fall (never, save in merest glimpses,
before that day), he had taken to look behind him, as though an eye had
been knocked in the back of his head.

Then, was that day of the announcement of Lakelands to Nataly, to be
accounted a gloomy day? He would not have it so.

She was happily occupied with her purchases of fur