Free, and rejoicing; without the wish to be free; at the same time humbly and sadly acquiescing in the stronger claim of his family to pronounce the decision:  such was the second stage of Dudley’s perturbation after the blow.  A letter of Nesta’s writing was in his pocket:  he knew her address.  He could not reply to her until he had seen her father:  and that interview remained necessarily prospective until he had come to his exact resolve, not omitting his critical approval of the sentences giving it shape, stamp, dignity—­a noble’s crest, as it were.

Nesta wrote briefly.  The apostrophe was, ‘Dear Mr. Sowerby.’  She had engaged to send her address.  Her father had just gone.  The Miss Duvidneys had left the hotel yesterday for the furnished house facing the sea.  According to arrangements, she had a livery-stable hack, and had that morning trotted out to the downs with a riding-master and company, one of whom was ‘an agreeable lady.’

He noticed approvingly her avoidance of an allusion to the ‘Delphica’ of Mr. Durance’s incomprehensible serial story, or whatever it was; which, as he had shown her, annoyed him, for its being neither fact nor fun; and she had insisted on the fun; and he had painfully tried to see it or anything of a meaning; and it seemed to him now, that he had been humiliated by the obedience to her lead:  she had offended by her harping upon Delphica.  However, here it was unmentioned.  He held the letter out to seize it in the large, entire.

Her handwriting was good, as good as the writing of the most agreeable lady on earth.  Dudley did not blame her for letting the lady be deceived in her—­if she knew her position.  She might be ignorant of it.  And to strangers, to chance acquaintances, even to friends, the position, of the loathsome name, was not materially important.  Marriage altered the view.  He sided with his family.

He sided, edgeing away, against his family.  But a vision of the earldom coming to him, stirred reverential objections, composed of all which his unstained family could protest in religion, to repudiate an alliance with a stained house, and the guilty of a condonation of immorality.  Who would have imagined Mr. Radnor a private sinner flaunting for one of the righteous?  And she, the mother, a lady—­quite a lady; having really a sense of duty, sense of honour!  That she must be a lady, Dudley was convinced.  He beheld through a porous crape, woven of formal respectfulness, with threads of personal disgust, the scene, striking him drearly like a distant great mansion’s conflagration across moorland at midnight, of a lady’s breach of bonds and plunge of all for love.  How had it been concealed?  In Dudley’s upper sphere, everything was exposed:  Scandal walked naked and unashamed-figurante of the polite world.  But still this lady was of the mint and coin, a true lady.  Handsome now, she must have been beautiful.  And a comprehensible pride (for so would Dudley have borne it) keeps the forsaken man silent up to death:  . . . grandly silent; but the loss of such a woman is enough to kill a man!  Not in time, though!  Legitimacy evidently, by the mother’s confession, cannot protect where it is wanted.  Dudley was optically affected by a round spot of the world swinging its shadow over Nesta.