The lady passed through the trial submitting, stiffening her shoulders, and at the close, shutting her eyes.  She stood cool in her blush, and eyed him, like one gravely awakened.  Having been embraced and kissed, she had to consider her taste for the man, and acknowledge a neatness of impetuosity in the deed; and he was neither apologizing culprit nor glorying-bandit when it was done, but something of the lyric God tempering his fervours to a pleased sereneness, not offering a renewal of them.  He glowed transparently.  He said:  ’You are the woman to take a front place in the battle!’ With this woman beside him, it was a conquered world.

Comparisons, in the jotting souvenirs of a woman of her class and set, favoured him; for she disliked enterprising libertines and despised stumbling youths; and the genial simple glow of his look assured her, that the vanished fiery moment would not be built on by a dating master.  She owned herself.  Or did she?  Some understanding of how the other woman had been won to the leap with him, was drawing in about her.  She would have liked to beg for the story; and she could as little do that as bring her tongue to reproach.  If we come to the den! she said to her thought of reproach.  Our semi-civilization makes it a den, where a scent in his nostrils will spring the half-tamed animal away to wildness.  And she had come unanticipatingly, without design, except perhaps to get a superior being to direct and restrain a gambler’s hand perhaps for the fee of a temporary pressure.

‘I may be able to help a little—­I hope!’ she fetched a breath to say, while her eyelids mildly sermonized; and immediately she talked of her inheritance of property in stocks and shares.

Victor commented passingly on the soundness of them, and talked of projects he entertained:—­Parliament!  ’But I have only to mention it at home, and my poor girl will set in for shrinking.’

He doated on the diverse aspect of the gallant woman of the world.

‘You succeed in everything you do,’ said she, and she cordially believed it; and that belief set the neighbour memory palpitating.  Success folded her waist, was warm upon her lips:  she worshipped the figure of Success.

‘I can’t consent to fail, it’s true, when my mind is on a thing,’ Victor rejoined.

He looked his mind on Lady Grace.  The shiver of a maid went over her.  These transparent visages, where the thought which is half design is perceived as a lightning, strike lightning into the physically feebler.  Her hand begged, with the open palm, her head shook thrice; and though she did not step back, he bowed to the negation, and then she gave him a grateful shadow of a smile, relieved, with a startled view of how greatly relieved, by that sympathetic deference in the wake of the capturing intrepidity.

‘I am to name Tuesday for Dudley?’ she suggested.

‘At any hour he pleases to appoint.’