‘Only the women, Mr. Sowerby?’

‘Men, too, of course.’

‘You do not exclude the men from Society.’

‘Oh! one reads that kind of argument in books.’

‘Oh! the worthy books, then.  I would read them, if I could find them.’

‘They are banned by self-respecting readers.’

‘It grieves me to think differently.’

Dudley looked on this fair girl, as yet innocent girl; and contrasting her with the foulness of the subject she dared discuss, it seemed to him, that a world which did not puff at her and silence, if not extinguish, was in a state of liquefaction.

Remembering his renewed repentances his absence, he said:  ’I do hope you may come to see, that the views shared by your mother and me are not erroneous.’

‘But do not distress her,’ Nesta implored him.  ’She is not well.  When she has grown stronger, her kind heart will move her to receive the lady, so that she may not be deprived of the society of good women.  I shall hope she will not disapprove of me.  I cannot forsake a friend.’

‘I beg to say good-bye,’ said Dudley.

She had seen a rigidity smite him as she spoke; and so little startling was it, that she might have fancied it expected, save for her knowing herself too serious to have played at wiles to gain her ends.

He ‘wished her prudent advisers.’

She thanked him.  ‘In a few days, Louise de Seilles will be here.’

A Frenchwoman and Papist! was the interjection of his twist of brows.

Surely I must now be free? she thought when he had covered his farewell under a salutation regretful in frostiness.

A week later, she had the embrace of her Louise, and Armandine was made happy with a piece of Parisian riband.

Winter was rapidly in passage:  changes were visible everywhere; Earth and House of Commons and the South London borough exhibited them; Mrs. Burman was the sole exception.  To the stupefaction of physicians, in a manner to make a sane man ask whether she was not being retained as an instrument for one of the darker purposes of Providence—­and where are we standing if we ask such things?—­she held on to her thread of life.

February went by.  And not a word from Themison; nor from Carling, nor from the Rev. Groseman Buttermore, nor from Jarniman.  That is to say, the two former accepted invitations to grand dinners; the two latter acknowledged contributions to funds in which they were interested; but they had apparently grown to consider Mrs. Burman as an establishment, one of our fixtures.  On the other hand, there was nothing to be feared from her.  Lakelands feared nothing:  the entry into Lakelands was decreed for the middle of April.  Those good creatures enclosed the poor woman and nourished her on comfortable fiction.  So the death of the member for the South London borough (fifteen years younger than the veteran in maladies) was not to be called premature, and could by no possibility lead to an exposure of the private history of the candidate for his vacant seat.