A more precious document had never been handed to him.  It chased back to midnight the doubt hovering over his belief in himself;—­phrased to say, that he was no longer the Victor Radnor known to the world.  And it extinguished a corpse-like recollection of a baleful dream in the night.  Here shone radiant witness of his being the very man; save for the spot of his recent confusion in distinguishing his identity or in feeling that he stood whole and solid.—­Because of two mature maiden ladies?  Yes, because of two maiden ladies, my good fellow.  And friend Colney, you know the ladies, and what the getting round them for one’s purposes really means.

The sprite of Colney Durance had struck him smartly overnight.  Victor’s internal crow was over Colney now.  And when you have the optimist and pessimist acutely opposed in a mixing group, they direct lively conversations at one another across the gulf of distance, even of time.  For a principle is involved, besides the knowledge of the other’s triumph or dismay.  The couple are scales of a balance; and not before last night had Victor ever consented to think of Colney ascending while he dropped low to graze the pebbles.

He left his hotel for the station, singing the great aria of the fourth Act of the Favorita:  neglected since that mighty German with his Rienzi, and Tannhauser, and Tristan and Isolda, had mastered him, to the displacement of his boyhood’s beloved sugary -inis and -antes and -zettis; had clearly mastered, not beguiled, him; had wafted him up to a new realm, invigorating if severer.  But now his youth would have its voice.  He travelled up to town with Sir Abraham Quatley and talked, and took and gave hints upon City and Commercial affairs, while the honeyed Italian of the conventional, gloriously animal, stress and flutter had a revel in his veins, now and then mutedly ebullient at the mouth:  honeyed, golden, rich in visions;—­having surely much more of Nature’s encouragement to her children?

CHAPTER XXIV

NESTA’S ENGAGEMENT

A word in his ear from Fenellan, touching that man Blathenoy, set the wheels of Victor’s brain at work upon his defences, for a minute, on the walk Westward.  Who knew?—­who did not know!  He had a torpid consciousness that he cringed to the world, with an entreaty to the great monster to hold off in ignorance; and the next instant, he had caught its miserable spies by the lurcher neck and was towering.  He dwelt on his contempt of them, to curtain the power they could stir.

‘The little woman, you say, took to Dartrey?’

Fenellan, with the usual apologetic moderation of a second statement, thought ‘there was the look of it.’

’Well, we must watch over her.  Dartrey!—­but Dartrey’s an honest fellow with women.  But men are men.  Very few men spare a woman when the mad fit is on her.  A little woman-pretty little woman!—­wife to Jacob Blathenoy!  She mustn’t at her age have any close choosing—­under her hand.  And Dartrey’s just the figure to strike a spark in a tinder-box head.’