‘I do understand,’ said Nesta.

’God help you!—­I am excited to-day.  That man is poison to me.  His wife forgave him three times.  On three occasions, that unhappy woman forgave him.  He is great at his oaths, and a big breaker of them.  She walked out one November afternoon and met him riding along with a notorious creature.  You know there are bad women.  They passed her, laughing.  And look there, Nesta, see that groyne; that very one.’  Mrs. Marsett pointed her whip hard out.  ’The poor lady went down from the height here; she walked into that rough water look!—­steadying herself along it, and she plunged; she never came out alive.  A week after her burial, Major Worrell—­I ‘ve told you enough.’

’We ‘ll gallop now,’ said Nesta.

Mrs. Marsett’s talk, her presence hardly less, affected the girl with those intimations of tumult shown upon smooth waters when the great elements are conspiring.  She felt that there was a cause why she had to pity, did pity her.  It might be, that Captain Marsett wedded one who was of inferior station,’ and his wife had to bear blows from cruel people.  The supposition seemed probable.  The girl accepted it; for beyond it, as the gathering of the gale masked by hills, lay a brewing silence.  What?  She did not reflect.  Her quick physical sensibility curled to some breath of heated atmosphere brought about her by this new acquaintance:  not pleasant, if she had thought of pleasure:  intensely suggestive of our life at the consuming tragic core, round which the furnace pants.  But she was unreflecting, feeling only a beyond and hidden.

Besides, she was an exile.  Spelling at dark things in the dark, getting to have the sight which peruses darkness, she touched the door of a mystery that denied her its key, but showed the lock; and her life was beginning to know of hours that fretted her to recklessness.  Her friend Louise was absent:  she had so few friends—­owing to that unsolved reason:  she wanted one, of any kind, if only gentle:  and this lady seemed to need her:  and she flattered; Nesta was in the mood for swallowing and digesting and making sweet blood of flattery.

At one time, she liked Mrs. Marsett best absent:  in musing on her, wishing her well, having said the adieu.  For it was wearisome to hear praises of ‘innocence’; and women can do so little to cure that ‘wickedness of men,’ among the lady’s conversational themes; and ‘love’ too:  it may be a ‘plague,’ and it may be ‘heaven’:  it is better left unspoken of.  But there were times when Mrs. Marsett’s looks and tones touched compassion to press her hand:  an act that had a pledgeing signification in the girl’s bosom:  and when, by the simple avoidance of ejaculatory fervours, Mrs. Marsett’s quieted good looks had a shadow of a tender charm, more pathetic than her outcries were.