Nesta likewise helped:  but more in what she did than in what she said:  she spoke intelligently enough to make him feel a certain increase of alarm, amounting to a cursory secret acknowledgement of it, both at her dealings with Dudley and with himself.  She so quietly displaced the lady visiting him at the City offices.  His girl’s disregard of hostile weather, and her company, her talk, delighted him:  still he remonstrated, at her coming daily.  She came:  nor was there an instigation on the part of her mother, clearly none:  her mother asked him once whether he thought she met the dreadful Brighton woman.  His Fredi drove constantly to walk back beside him Westward, as he loved to do whenever it was practicable; and exceeding the flattery of his possession of the gallant daughter, her conversation charmed him to forget a disappointment caused by the defeat and entire exclusion of the lady visiting him so complimentarily for his advice on stocks, shares, mines, et caetera.  The lady resisted; she was vanquished, as the shades are displaced by simple apparition of daylight.

His Fredi was like the daylight to him; she was the very daylight to his mind, whatsoever their theme of converse for by stimulating that ready but vagrant mind to quit the leash of the powerful senses and be a ethereally excursive, she gave him a new enjoyment; which led to reflections—­a sounding of Nature, almost a question to her, on the verge of a doubt.  Are we, in fact, harmonious with the Great Mother when we yield to the pressure of our natures for indulgence?  Is she, when translated into us, solely the imperious appetite?  Here was Fredi, his little Fredi—­stately girl that she had grown, and grave, too, for all her fun and her sail on wings—­lifting him to pleasures not followed by clamorous, and perfectly satisfactory, yet discomposingly violent, appeals to Nature.  They could be vindicated.  Or could they, when they would not bear a statement of the case?  He could not imagine himself stating it namelessly to his closest friend—­not to Simeon Fenellan.  As for speaking to Dartrey, the notion took him with shivers:—­Young Dudley would have seemed a more possible confidant:—­and he represented the Puritan world.—­And young Dudley was getting over Fredi’s infatuation for the woman she had rescued:  he was beginning to fancy he saw a right enthusiasm in it;—­in the abstract; if only the fair maid would drop an unseemly acquaintance.  He had called at the office to say so.  Victor stammered the plea for him.

‘Never, dear father,’ came the smooth answer:  a shocking answer in contrast with the tones.  Her English was as lucid as her eyes when she continued up to the shock she dealt:  ’Do not encourage a good man to waste his thoughts upon me.  I have chosen my mate, and I may never marry him.  I do not know whether he would marry me.  He has my soul.  I have no shame in saying I love him.  It is to love goodness, greatness of