Victor started to the fire-screen.  ‘Your sight requires protection.’

She dozed.  ‘And Natalia Dreighton !’ she next said.

They were certainly now on the five minutes.  Now for the slide downward and outward!  Nataly should never have been allowed to come.

‘The white waistcoat!’ struck his ears.

‘Old customs with me, always!’ he responded.  ’The first of April, always.  White is a favourite.  Pale blue, too.  But I fear—­I hope you have not distressing nights?  In my family we lay great stress on the nights we pass.  My cousins, the Miss Duvidneys, go so far as to judge of the condition of health by the nightly record.’

‘Your daughter was in their house.’

She knew everything!

‘Very fond of my daughter—­the ladies,’ he remarked.

‘I wish her well.’

‘You are very kind.’

Mrs. Burman communed within or slept.  ‘Victor, Natalia, we will pray,’ she said.

Her trembling hands crossed their fingers.  Nataly slipped to her knees.

The two women mutely praying, pulled Victor into the devotional hush.  It acted on him like the silent spell of service in a Church.  He forgot his estimate of the minutes, he formed a prayer, he refused to hear the Cupid swinging, he droned a sound of sentences to deaden his ears.  Ideas of eternity rolled in semblance of enormous clouds.  Death was a black bird among them.  The piano rang to Nataly’s young voice and his.  The gold and white of the chairs welcomed a youth suddenly enrolled among the wealthy by an enamoured old lady on his arm.  Cupid tick-ticked.—­Poor soul! poor woman!  How little we mean to do harm when we do an injury!  An incomprehensible world indeed at the bottom and at the top.  We get on fairly at the centre.  Yet it is there that we do the mischief making such a riddle of the bottom and the top.  What is to be said!  Prayer quiets one.  Victor peered at Nataly fervently on her knees and Mrs. Burman bowed over her knotted fingers.  The earnestness of both enforced an effort at a phrased prayer in him.  Plungeing through a wave of the scent of Marechale, that was a tremendous memory to haul him backward and forward, he beheld his prayer dancing across the furniture; a diminutive thin black figure, elvish, irreverent, appallingly unlike his proper emotion; and he brought his hands just to touch, and got to the edge of his chair, with split knees.  At once the figure vanished.  By merely looking at Nataly, he passed into her prayer.  A look at Mrs. Burman made it personal, his own.  He heard the cluck of a horrible sob coming from him.  After a repetition of his short form of prayer deeply stressed, he thanked himself with the word ‘sincere,’ and a queer side-thought on our human susceptibility to the influence of posture.  We are such creatures.

Nataly resumed her seat.  Mrs. Burman had raised her head.  She said:  ’We are at peace.’  She presently said, with effort:  ’It cannot last with me.  I die in nature’s way.  I would bear forgiveness with me, that I may have it above.  I give it here, to you, to all.  My soul is cleansed, I trust.  Much was to say.  My strength will not.  Unto God, you both!’