We all can do that, I hope, for a scratch!’

Mr. Barmby’s Profession dissented.

Mr. Catkin appeared; ten minutes after his Peridon.  He had met Victor near the Exchange, and had left him humming the non fu sogno of ERNANI.

’Ah, when Victor takes to Verdi, it’s a flat City, and wants a burst of drum and brass,’ Colney said; and he hummed a few bars of the march in Attila, and shrugged.  He and Victor had once admired that blatancy.

Mr. Pempton appeared, according to anticipation.  He sat himself beside Priscilla.  Entered Mrs. John Cormyn, voluminous; Mrs. Peter Yatt, effervescent; Nataly’s own people were about her and she felt at home.

Mrs. Blathenoy pushed a small thorn into it, by speaking of Captain Fenellan, and aside, as if sharing him with her.  Nataly heard that Dartrey had been the guest of these Blathenoys.  Even Dartrey was but a man!

Rather lower under her voice, the vain little creature asked:  ’You knew her?’

‘Her?’

The cool counter-interrogation was disregarded.  ’So sad!  In the desert! a cup of pure water worth more than barrow-loads of gold!  Poor woman!’

‘Who?’

‘His wife.’

‘Wife!’

‘They were married?’

Nataly could have cried:  Snake!  Her play at brevity had certainly been foiled.  She nodded gravely.  A load of dusky wonders and speculations pressed at her bosom.  She disdained to question the mouth which had bitten her.

Mrs. Blathenoy, resolving, that despite the jealousy she excited, she would have her friend in Captain Fenellan, whom she liked—­liked, she was sure, quite as innocently as any other woman of his acquaintance did, departed and she hugged her innocence defiantly, with the mournful pride which will sometimes act as a solvent.

A remark or two passed among the company upon her pretty face.

Nataly murmured to Colney:  ‘Is there anything of Dartrey’s wife?’

‘Dead,’ he answered.

‘When?’

‘Months back.  I had it from Simeon.  You didn’t hear?’

She shook her head.  Her ears buzzed.  If he had it from Simeon Fenellan, Victor must have known it.

Her duties of hostess were conducted with the official smile.

As soon as she stood alone, she dropped on a chair, like one who has taken a shot in the heart, and that hideous tumult of wild cries at her ears blankly ceased.  Dartrey, Victor, Nesta, were shifting figures of the might-have-been for whom a wretched erring woman, washed clean of her guilt by death, in a far land, had gone to her end:  vainly gone:  and now another was here, a figure of wood, in man’s shape, conjured up by one of the three, to divide the two others; likely to be fatal to her or to them:  to her, she hoped, if the choice was to be:  and beneath the leaden hope, her heart set to a rapid beating, a fainter, a chill at the core.

She snatched for breath.  She shut her eyes, and with open lips, lay waiting; prepared to thank the kindness about to hurry her hence, out of the seas of pain, without pain.