Her dream of a love was put away like a botanist’s pressed weed.  But after hearing Judith Marsett’s wild sobs, it had no place in her cherishing.  For, above all, the unhappy woman protested love to have been the cause of her misery.  She moaned of ‘her Ned’; of his goodness, his deceitfulness, her trustfulness; his pride and the vileness of his friends; her longsuffering and her break down of patience.  It was done for the proof of her unworthiness of Nesta’s friendship:  that she might be renounced, and embraced.  She told the pathetic half of her story, to suit the gentle ear, whose critical keenness was lost in compassion.  How deep the compassion, mixed with the girl’s native respect for the evil-fortuned, may be judged by her inaccessibility to a vulgar tang that she was aware of in the deluge of the torrent, where Innocence and Ned and Love and a proud Family and that beast Worrell rolled together in leaping and shifting involutions.

A darkness of thunder was on the girl.  Although she was not one to shrink beneath it like the small bird of the woods, she had to say within herself many times, ‘I shall see Captain Dartrey to-morrow,’ for a recovery and a nerving.  And with her thought of him, her tooth was at her underlip, she struggled abashed, in hesitation over men’s views of her sex, and how to bring a frank mind to meet him; to be sure of his not at heart despising; until his character swam defined and bright across her scope.  ‘He is good to women.’  Fragments of conversation, principally her father’s, had pictured Captain Dartrey to her most manfully tolerant toward a frivolous wife.

He came early in the morning, instantly after breakfast.

Not two minutes had passed before she was at home with him.  His words, his looks, revived her spirit of romance, gave her the very landscapes, and new ones.  Yes, he was her hero.  But his manner made him also an adored big brother, stamped splendid by the perils of life.  He sat square, as if alert to rise, with an elbow on a knee, and the readiest turn of head to speakers, the promptest of answers, eyes that were a brighter accent to the mouth, so vividly did look accompany tone.  He rallied her, chatted and laughed; pleased the ladies by laughing at Colney Durance, and inspired her with happiness when he spoke of England:—­that ’One has to be in exile awhile, to see the place she takes.’

‘Oh, Captain Dartrey, I do like to hear you say so,’ she cried; his voice was reassuring also in other directions:  it rang of true man.

He volunteered, however, a sad admission, that England had certainly lost something of the great nation’s proper conception of Force:  the meaning of it, virtue of it, and need for it.  ’She bleats for a lesson, and will get her lesson.’

But if we have Captain Dartrey, we shall come through!  So said the sparkle of Nesta’s eyes.

‘She is very like her father,’ he said to the ladies.