Her chagrin resolved to a kind of solace of her draggled pride, in the idea, that he who tamed everybody to submission, might well have command of her.

The note, signed D. and V., was shown.

There stood the words.  And last night she had been partly of the opinion of Colney Durance.  She sank down among the unreasoning abject;—­not this time with her perfect love of him, but with a resistance and a dubiety under compression.  For she had not quite comprehended why Nesta should go.  This readiness of the Duvidney ladies to receive the girl, stopped her mental inquiries.

She begged for a week’s delay; ‘before the parting’; as her dear old silly mother’s pathos whimpered it, of the separation for a month! and he smiled and hummed pleasantly at any small petition, thinking her in error to expect Dartrey’s return to town before the close of a week; and then wondering at women, mildly denouncing in his heart the mothers who ran risk of disturbing their daughters’ bosoms with regard to particular heroes married or not.  Dartrey attracted women:  he was one of the men who do it without effort.  Victor’s provident mind blamed the mother for the indiscreetness of her wish to have him among them.  But Dudley had been making way bravely of late; he improved; he began to bloom, like a Spring flower of the garden protected from frosts under glass; and Fredi was the sheltering and nourishing bestower of the lessons.  One could see, his questions and other little points revealed, that he had a certain lover’s dread of Dartrey Fenellan; a sort of jealousy:  Victor understood the feeling.  To love a girl, who has her ideal of a man elsewhere in another; though she may know she never can wed the man, and has not the hope of it; is torment to the lover quailing, as we do in this terrible season of the priceless deliciousness, stripped against all the winds that blow; skinless at times.  One gets up a sympathy for the poor shy dependent shivering lover.  Nevertheless, here was young Dudley waking, visibly becoming bolder.  As in the flute-duets, he gained fire from concert.  The distance between Cronidge and Moorsedge was two miles and a quarter.

Instead of the delay of a whole week, Victor granted four days, which embraced a musical evening at Mrs. John Cormyn’s on the last of the days, when Nesta was engaged to sing with her mother a duet of her own composition, the first public fruit of her lessons in counterpoint from rigid Herr Strauscher, who had said what he had said, in letting it pass:  eulogy, coming from him.  So Victor heard, and he doated am the surprise to come for him, in a boyish anticipation.  The girl’s little French ballads under tutelage of Louise de Seilles promised, though they were imitative.  If Strauscher let this pass . . .  Victor saw Grand Opera somewhere to follow; England’s claim to be a creative musical nation vindicated; and the genius of the fair sex as well.