That was uttered within a few minutes of midnight, when the ladies of Moorsedge themselves, after an exhausting resistance to their dearest relative, were at the hall-door of the house with Victor, saying the good-night, to which he responded hurriedly, cordially, dumbly, a baffled man.  They clasped hands.  Miss Dorothea said: 

‘You, Victor, always.’  Miss Virginia said:  ‘You will be sure of welcome.’  He walked out upon the moonless night; and for lack of any rounded object in the smothering darkness to look at, he could nowhere take moorings to gather himself together and define the man who had undergone so portentous a defeat.  He was glad of quarters at an hotel, a solitary bed, absence from his Nataly.

For their parts, the ladies were not less shattered.  They had no triumph in their victory:  the weight of it bore them down.  They closed, locked, shot the bolts and fastened the chain of the door.  They had to be reminded by the shaking of their darling dog Tasso’s curly silky coat, that he had not taken his evening’s trot to notify malefactors of his watchfulness and official wrath at sound of footfall or a fancied one.  Without consultation, they unbolted the door, and Tasso went forth, to ‘compose his vesper hymn,’ as Mr. Posterley once remarked amusingly.

Though not pretending to the Muse’s crown so far, the little dog had qualities to entrance the spinster sex.  His mistresses talked of him; of his readiness to go forth; of the audible first line of his hymn or sonnet; of his instinct telling him that something was wrong in the establishment.  For most of the servants at Moorsedge were prostrated by a fashionable epidemic; a slight attack, the doctor said; but Montague, the butler, had withdrawn for the nursing of his wife; Perrin, the footman, was confined to his chamber; Manton, the favourite maid, had appeared in the morning with a face that caused her banishment to bed; and the cook, Mrs. Bannister, then sighingly agreed to send up cold meat for the ladies’ dinner.  Hence their melancholy inhospitality to their cousin Victor, who had, in spite of his errors, the right to claim his place at their table, was ‘of the blood,’ they said.  He was recognized as the living prince of it.  His every gesture, every word, recalled the General.  The trying scene with him had withered them, they did not speak of it; each had to the other the look of a vessel that has come out of a gale.  Would they sleep?  They scarcely dared ask it of themselves.  They had done rightly; silence upon that reflection seemed best.  It was the silence of an inward agitation; still they knew the power of good consciences to summon sleep.