her present tonelessness of blood and being.  Her unresponsive manner with him was not due to lack of fire in the blood or a loss of tenderness.  The tender feeling, under privations unwillingly imposed, though willingly shared, now suffused her reflections, owing to a gratitude induced by a novel experience of him; known, as it may chance, and as it does not always chance, to both sexes in wedded intimacy here and there; known to women whose mates are proved quick to compliance with delicate intuitions of their moods of nature.  A constant, almost visible, image of the dark thing she desired, and was bound not to desire, and was remorseful for desiring, oppressed her; a perpetual consequent warfare of her spirit and the nature subject to the thousand sensational hypocrisies invoked for concealment of its reviled brutish baseness, held the woman suspended from her emotions.  She coldly felt that a caress would have melted her, would have been the temporary rapture.  Coldly she had the knowledge that the considerate withholding of it helped her spirit to escape a stain.  Less coldly, she thanked at heart her beloved, for being a gentleman in their yoke.  It plighted them over flesh.

He talked to her on the pillow, just a few sentences; and, unlike himself, a word of City affairs:  ’That fellow Blathenoy, with his increasing multitude of bills at the Bank:  must watch him there, sit there regularly.  One rather likes his wife.  By the way, if you see him near me to-morrow, praise the Spanish climate; don’t forget.  He heads the subscription list of Lady Blachington’s Charity.’

Victor chuckled at Colney’s humping of shoulders and mouth, while the tempest seemed echoing a sulphurous pessimist.  ’If old Colney had listened to me, when India gave proof of the metal and South Africa began heaving, he’d have been a fairly wealthy man by now . . . ha! it would have genialized him.  A man may be a curmudgeon with money:  the rule is for him to cuddle himself and take a side, instead of dashing at his countrymen all round and getting hated.  Well, Colney popular, can’t be imagined; but entertaining guests would have diluted his acid.  He has the six hundred or so a year he started old bachelor on; add his miserable pay for Essays.  Literature!  Of course, he sours.  But don’t let me hear of bachelors moralists.  There he sits at his Temple Chambers hatching epigrams . . . pretends to have the office of critic!  Honest old fellow, as far as his condition permits.  I tell him it will be fine to-morrow.’

‘You are generally right, dear,’ Nataly said.

Her dropping breath was audible.

Victor smartly commended her to slumber, with heaven’s blessing on her and a dose of soft nursery prattle.

He squeezed her hand.  He kissed her lips by day.  She heard him sigh settling himself into the breast of night for milk of sleep, like one of the world’s good children.  She could have turned to him, to show him she was in harmony with the holy night and loving world, but for the fear founded on a knowledge of the man he was; it held her frozen to the semblance of a tombstone lady beside her lord, in the aisle where horror kindles pitchy blackness with its legions at one movement.  Verily it was the ghost of Mrs. Burman come to the bed, between them.