‘Mr. Sowerby?’ said she.  ’He was to have escorted me back.  He may have overslept himself.’

She spoke it plainly; when speaking of the dear good ladies, she set a gentle humour at play, and comforted him, as she intended, with a souvenir of her lively spirit, wanting only in the manner of gaiety.

He allowed, that she could not be quite gay.

More deeply touched the next minute, he felt in her voice, in her look, in her phrasing of speech, an older, much older daughter than the Fredi whom he had conducted to Moorsedge.  ‘Kiss me,’ he said.

She turned to him full-front, and kissed his right cheek and left, and his forehead, saying:  ‘My love! my papa! my own dear dada!’ all the words of her girlhood in her new sedateness; and smiling:  like the moral crepuscular of a sunlighted day down a not totally inanimate Sunday Londen street.

He strained her to his breast.  ‘Mama soon be here?’

‘Soon.’

That was well.  And possibly at the present moment applying, with her cunning hand, the cosmetics and powders he could excuse for a concealment of the traces of grief.

Satisfied in being a superficial observer, he did not spy to see more than the world would when Nataly entered the dining-room at the quiet family dinner.  She performed her part for his comfort, though not prattling; and he missed his Fredi’s delicious warble of the prattle running rill-like over our daily humdrum.  Simeon Fenellan would have helped.  Then suddenly came enlivenment:  a recollection of news in the morning’s paper.  ’No harm before Fredi, my dear.  She’s a young woman now.  And no harm, so to speak-at least, not against the Sanfredini.  She has donned her name again, and a villa on Como, leaving her ‘duque’; —­paragraph from a Milanese musical Journal; no particulars.  Now, mark me, we shall have her at Lakelands in the Summer.  If only we could have her now!’

‘It would be a pleasure,’ said Nataly.  Her heart had a blow in the thought, that a lady of this kind would create the pleasure by not bringing criticism.

‘The godmother?’ he glistened upon Nesta.

She gave him low half-notes of the little blue butterfly’s imitation of the superb contralto; and her hand and head at turn to hint the theatrical operatic attitude.

‘Delicious!’ he cried, his eyelids were bedewed at the vision of the three of them planted in the past; and here again, out of the dark wood, where something had required to be said, and had been said; and all was happily over, owing to the goodness and sweetness of the two dear innocents;—­whom heaven bless!  Jealousy of their naturally closer heart-at-heart, had not a whisper for him; part of their goodness and sweetness was felt to be in the not excluding him.

Nesta engaged to sing one of the ’old duets with her mother.  She saw her mother’s breast lift in a mechanical effort to try imaginary notes, as if doubtful of her capacity, more at home in the dumb deep sigh they fell to.  Her mother’s heroism made her a sacred woman to the thoughts of the girl, overcoming wonderment at the extreme submissiveness.