long distances away to forests and nests.  This little woman had the rosy-peeping June bud’s plumpness.  What of the man who refused to kiss her once?  Cold antecedent immersion had to be thanked; and stringent vacuity; perhaps a spotting ogre-image of her possessor.  Some sense of right-doing also, we hope.  Dartrey angrily attributed his good conduct to the lowest motives.  He went so far as to accuse himself of having forborne to speak of breakfast, from a sort of fascinated respect for the pitch of a situation that he despised and detested.  Then again, when beginning to eat, his good conduct drew on him a chorus of the jeers of all the martial comrades he had known.  But he owned he would have had less excuse than they, had he taken advantage of a woman’s inability, at a weak moment, to protect herself:  or rather, if he had not behaved in a manner to protect her from herself.  He thought of his buried wife, and the noble in the base of that poor soul; needing constantly a present helper, for the nobler to conquer.  Be true man with a woman, she must be viler than the devil has yet made one, if she does not follow a strong right lead:—­but be patient, of course.  And the word patience here means more than most men contain.  Certainly a man like Jacob Blathenoy was a mouthful for any woman:  and he had bought his wife, he deserved no pity.  Not?  Probably not.  That view, however, is unwholesome and opens on slides.  Pity of his wife, too, gets to be fervidly active with her portrait, fetches her breath about us.  As for condemnation of the poor little woman, her case was not unexampled, though the sudden flare of it startled rather.  Mrs. Victor could read men and women closely.  Yes, and Victor, when he schemed—­but Dartrey declined to be throwing blame right or left.  More than by his breakfast, and in a preferable direction, he was refreshed by Skepsey’s narrative of the deeds of Matilda Pridden.

‘The right sort of girl for you to know, Skepsey,’ he said.  ’The best in life is a good woman.’

Skepsey exhibited his book of the Gallic howl.

‘They have their fits now and then, and they’re soon over and forgotten,’ Dartrey said.  ‘The worst of it is, that we remember.’

After the morning’s visit to his uncle, he peered at half a dozen sticks in the corner of the room, grasped their handles, and selected the Demerara supple-jack, for no particular reason; the curved knot was easy to the grasp.  It was in his mind, that this person signing herself Judith Marsett, might have something to say, which intimately concerned Nesta.  He fell to brooding on it, until he wondered why he had not been made a trifle anxious by the reading of the note overnight.  Skepsey was left at Nesta’s house.

Dartrey found himself expected by the servant waiting on Mrs. Marsett.

CHAPTER XXXII

SHOWS HOW TEMPER MAY KINDLE TEMPER AND AN INDIGNANT WOMAN GET HER WEAPON