a week.  But you are here—­ true, I could swear! a touch of a hand tells me.  A woman’s hand?  Well, yes:  I read by the touch of a woman’s hand:—­betrays more than her looks or her lips!’ He sank his voice.  ’I don’t talk of condoling:  if you are in grief, you know I share it.’  He kissed her hand, and laid it on her lap; eyed it, and met her eyes; took a header into her eyes, and lost himself.  A nip of his conscience moved his tongue to say:  ’As for guilt, if it were known . . . a couple of ascetics—­absolutely!’ But this was assumed to be unintelligible; and it was merely the apology to his conscience in communion with the sprite of a petticoated fair one who was being subjected to tender little liberties, necessarily addressed in enigmas.  He righted immediately, under a perception of the thoroughbred’s contempt for the barriers of wattled sheep; and caught the word ‘guilt,’ to hide the Philistine citizen’s lapse, by relating historically, in abridgement, the honest beauty of the passionate loves of the two whom the world proscribed for honestly loving.  There was no guilt.  He harped on the word, to erase the recollection of his first use of it.

‘Fiddle,’ said Lady Grace.  ’The thing happened.  You have now to carry it through.  You require a woman’s aid in a social matter.  Rely on me, for what I can do.  You will see Dudley on Tuesday?  I will write.  Be plain with him; not forgetting the gilding, I need not remark.  Your Nesta has no aversion?’

‘Admires, respects, likes; is quite—­is willing.’

‘Good enough beginning.’  She rose, for the atmosphere was heated, rather heavy.  ’And if one proves to be of aid, you’ll own that a woman has her place in the battle.’

The fair black-clad widow’s quick and singular interwreathing of the evanescent pretty pouts and frowns dimpled like the brush of the wind on a sunny pool in a shady place; and her forehead was close below his chin, her lips not far.  Her apparel was attractively mourning.

Widows in mourning, when they do not lean over extremely to the Stygian shore, with the complexions of the drugs which expedited the defunct to the ferry, provoke the manly arm within reach of them to pluck their pathetic blooming persons clean away from it.  What of the widow who visibly likes the living?  Compassion; sympathy, impulse; and gratitude, impulse again, living warmth; and a spring of the blood to wrestle with the King of Terrors for the other poor harper’s half-night capped Eurydice; and a thirst, sudden as it is overpowering; and the solicitude, a reflective solicitude, to put the seal on a thing and call it a fact, to the astonishment of history; and a kick of our naughty youth in its coffin; all the insurgencies of Nature, with her colonel of the regiment absent, and her veering trick to drive two vessels at the cross of a track into collision, combine for doing that, which is very much more, and which affects us at times so much less than did the pressure of a soft wedded hand by our own elsewhere pledged one.  On the contrary, we triumph, we have the rich flavour of the fruit for our pains; we commission the historian to write in hieroglyphs a round big fact.