The clasping and the worshipping were independent of personal ardours:  quaintly mixed with semi-paternal recollections of the little ’blue butterfly’ of the days at Craye.  Farm and Creckholt; and he had heard of Dudley Sowerby’s pretensions to; her hand.  Nesta’s youthfulness cast double age on him from the child’s past.  He pictured the child; pictured the girl, with her look of solitariness of sight; as in the desolate wide world, where her noble compassion for a woman had unexpectedly, painfully, almost by transubstantiation, rack-screwed her to woman’s mind.  And above sorrowful, holy were those eyes.

They held sway over Dartrey, and lost it some steps on; his demon temper urgeing him to strike at Major Worrell, as the cause of her dismayed expression.  He was not the happier for dropping to his nature; but we proceed more easily, all of us, when the strain which lifts us a foot or two off our native level is relaxed.

CHAPTER XXXIII

A PAIR OF WOOERS

That ashen look of the rise out of death from one of our mortal wounds, was caused by deeper convulsions in Nesta’s bosom than Dartrey could imagine.

She had gone for the walk with Mr. Barmby, reading the omen of his tones in the request.  Dorothea and Virginia would have her go.  The clerical gentleman, a friend of the Rev. Abram Posterley; and one who deplored poor Mr. Posterley’s infatuation; and one besides who belonged to Nesta’s musical choir in London:  seemed a safe companion for the child.  The grand organ of Mr. Barmby’s voice, too, assured them of a devout seriousness in him, that arrested any scrupulous little questions.  They could not conceive his uttering the nonsensical empty stuff, compliments to their beauty and what not, which girls hear sometimes from inconsiderate gentlemen, to the having of their heads turned.  Moreover, Nesta had rashly promised her father’s faithful servant Skepsey to walk, out with him in the afternoon; and the ladies hoped she would find the morning’s walk to have been enough; good little man though Skepsey was, they were sure.  But there is the incongruous for young women of station on a promenade.

Mr. Barmby headed to the pier.  After pacing up and down between the briny gulls and a polka-band, he made his way forethoughtfully to the glass-sheltered seats fronting East:  where, as his enthusiasm for the solemnity of the occasion excited him to say, ’We have a view of the terraces and the cliffs’; and where not more than two enwrapped invalid figures were ensconsed.  Then it was, that Nesta recalled her anticipation of his possible design; forgotten by her during their talk of her dear people:  Priscilla Graves and Mr. Pempton, and the Yatts, and Simeon Fenellan, Peridon and Catkin, and Skepsey likewise; and the very latest news of her mother.  She wished she could have run before him, to spare him.  He would not notice a sign.  Girls must wait and hear.