He sprang out at the head of the park, for a tramp round it, in the gloom of the girdle of lights, to recover his deadened relish of the thin phantasmal strife to win an intangible prize.  His dulled physical system asked, as with the sensations of a man at the start from sleep in the hurrying grip of steam, what on earth he wanted to get, and what was the substance of his gains:  what! if other than a precipitous intimacy, a deep crumbling over deeper, with a little woman amusing him in remarks of a whimsical nudity; hardly more.  Nay, not more! he said; and at the end of twenty paces, he saw much more; the campaign gathered a circling suggestive brilliancy, like the lamps about the winter park; the Society, lured with glitter, hooked by greed, composed a ravishing picture; the little woman was esteemed as a serviceable lieutenant; and her hand was a small soft one, agreeable to fondle—­and avaunt!  But so it is in war:  we must pay for our allies.  What if it had been, that he and she together, with their united powers . . . ?  He dashed the silly vision aside, as vainer than one of the bubble-empires blown by boys; and it broke, showing no heart in it.  His heart was Nataly’s.

Let Colney hint his worst; Nataly bore the strain, always did bear any strain coming in the round of her duties:  and if she would but walk, or if she danced at parties, she would scatter the fits of despondency besetting the phlegmatic, like this day’s breeze the morning fog; or as he did with two minutes of the stretch of legs.

Full of the grandeur of that black pit of the benighted London, with its ocean-voice of the heart at beat along the lighted outer ring, Victor entered at his old door of the two houses he had knocked into one:  a surprise for Fredi!—­and heard that his girl had arrived in the morning.

‘And could no more endure her absence from her Mammy O!’ The songful satirical line spouted in him, to be flung at his girl, as he ran upstairs to the boudoir off the drawing-room.

He peeped in.  It was dark.  Sensible of presences, he gradually discerned a thick blot along the couch to the right of the door, and he drew near.  Two were lying folded together; mother and daughter.  He bent over them.  His hand was taken and pressed by Fredi’s; she spoke; she said tenderly:  ‘Father.’  Neither of the two made a movement.  He heard the shivering rise of a sob, that fell.  The dry sob going to the waste breath was Nataly’s.  His girl did not speak again.

He left them.  He had no thought until he stood in his dressing-room, when he said ‘Good!’ For those two must have been lying folded together during the greater part of the day:  and it meant, that the mother’s heart had opened; the girl knew.  Her tone:  ‘Father,’ sweet, was heavy, too, with the darkness it came out of.

So she knew.  Good.  He clasped them both in his heart; tempering his pity of those dear ones with the thought, that they were of the sex which finds enjoyment in a day of the mutual tear; and envying them; he strained at a richness appearing in the sobs of their close union.