Victor could not explain how he had been brought to grant it.  He was at pains to conceal the bewilderment Mr. Barmby had cast on him, and make Nataly see the smallness of the grant:—­both of them were unwilling to lose Barmby; there was not the slightest fear about Fredi, he said; and why should not poor Barmby have his chance with the others in the race! —­and his Nataly knew that he hated to speak unkindly:  he could cry the negative like a crack of thunder in the City.  But such matters as these! and a man pleading merely for the right to see the girl!—­and pleading in a tone . . .  ‘I assure you, my love, he touched chords.’

‘Did he allude to advantages in the alliance with him?’ Nataly asked smoothly.

’His passion—­nothing else.  Candid enough.  And he had a tone—­he has a tone, you know.  It ’s not what he said.  Some allusion to belief in a favourable opinion of him . . . encouragement . . . on the part of the mama.  She would have him travelling with us!  I foresaw it.’

‘You were astonished when it came.’

‘We always are.’

Victor taunted her softly with having encouraged Mr. Barmby.

She had thought in her heart—­not seriously; on a sigh of despondency—­ that Mr. Barmby espousing the girl would smooth a troubled prospect:  and a present resentment at her weakness rendered her shrewd to detect Victor’s cunning to cover his own:  a thing imaginable of him previously in sentimental matters, yet never accurately and so legibly printed on her mind.  It did not draw her to read him with a novel familiarity; it drew her to be more sensible of foregone intimations of the man he was —­irresistible in attack, not impregnably defensive.  Nor did he seem in this instance humanely considerate:  if mademoiselle’s estimate of the mind of the girl was not wrong, then Mr. Barmby’s position would be both a ridiculous and a cruel one.  She had some silly final idea that 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.