’But a blow—­what a word for it!  But it’s life to us life!  It’s the blow we’ve prayed for.  Why, you know it!  Let her strike, we bless her.  We’ve never had an ill feeling to the woman; utterly the contrary—­pity, pity, pity!  Let her do that, we’re at her feet, my Nataly and I. If you knew what my poor girl suffers!  She ’s a saint at the stake.  Chiefly on behalf of her family.  Fenellan, you may have a sort of guess at my fortune:  I’ll own to luck; I put in a claim to courage and calculation.’

‘You’ve been a bulwark to your friends.’

’All, Fenellan, all-stocks, shares, mines, companies, industries at home and—­abroad—­all, at a sweep, to have the woman strike that blow!  Cheerfully would I begin to build a fortune over again—­singing!  Ha! the woman has threatened it before.  It’s probably feline play with us.’

His chin took support, he frowned.

‘You may have touched her.’

’She won’t be touched, and she won’t be driven.  What ’s the secret of her?  I can’t guess, I never could.  She’s a riddle.’

’Riddles with wigs and false teeth have to be taken and shaken for the ardently sought secret to reveal itself,’ said Mr. Fenellan.

His picture, with the skeleton issue of any shaking, smote Mr. Radnor’s eyes, they turned over.  ’Oh!—­her charms!  She had a desperate belief in her beauty.  The woman ’s undoubtedly charitable; she’s not without a mind—­sort of mind:  well, it shows no crack till it’s put to use.  Heart! yes, against me she has plenty of it.  They say she used to be courted; she talked of it:  “my courtiers, Mr. Victor!” There, heaven forgive me, I wouldn’t mock at her to another.’

‘It looks as if she were only inexorably human,’ said Mr. Fenellan, crushing a delicious gulp of the wine, that foamed along the channel to flavour.  ’We read of the tester of a bandit-bed; and it flattened unwary recumbents to pancakes.  An escape from the like of that seems pleadable, should be:  none but the drowsy would fail to jump out and run, or the insane.’

Mr. Radnor was taken with the illustration of his case.  ’For the sake of my sanity, it was! to preserve my . . . . but any word makes nonsense of it.  Could—­I must ask you—­could any sane man—­you were abroad in those days, horrible days! and never met her:  I say, could you consent to be tied—­I admit the vow, ceremony, so forth-tied to—­I was barely twenty-one:  I put it to you, Fenellan, was it in reason an engagement—­which is, I take it, a mutual plight of faith, in good faith; that is, with capacity on both sides to keep the engagement:  between the man you know I was in youth and a more than middle-aged woman crazy up to the edge of the cliff—­as Colney says half the world is, and she positively is when her spite is roused.  No, Fenellan, I have nothing on my conscience with regard to the woman.  She had wealth:  I left her not one penny the worse for—­but she was not one to reckon it, I own.  She could be generous, was, with her money.  If she had struck this blow—­I know she thought of it:  or if she would strike it now, I could not only forgive her, I could beg forgiveness.’