‘You have a letter, Victor?’

‘Confirmation all round:  Fenellan, Themison, and now Skepsey.’

He told her the tale of Skepsey and Jarniman, colouring it, as any interested animated conduit necessarily will.  Neither of them smiled.

The effort to think soberly exhausted and rolled her back on credulity.

It might not be to-day or next week or month:  but so much testimony pointed to a day within the horizon, surely!

She bowed her head to heaven for forgiveness.  The murderous hope stood up, stood out in forms and pictures.  There was one of a woman at her ease at last in the reception of guests; contrasting with an ironic haunting figure 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.’