Mrs. Blathenoy came down with an arm on Nesta’s shoulder.  She held a telegram, and said to Nataly—­

’What can this mean?  It’s from my husband; he puts “Jacob”:  my husband’s Christian name:—­so like my husband, where there’s no concealment!  There—­he says: 

“Down to-night else pack ready start to-morrow.”  Can it signify, affairs are bad with my husband in the city?’

It had that signification to Nataly’s understanding.  At the same time, the pretty little woman’s absurd lisping repetition of ‘my husband’ did not seem without design to inflict the wound it caused.

In reality, it was not malicious; it came of the bewitchment of a silly tongue by her knowledge of the secret to be controlled:  and after contrasting her fortunes with Nataly’s, on her way downstairs, she had comforted herself by saying, that at least she had a husband.  She was not aware that she dealt a hurt until she had found a small consolation in the indulgence:  for Captain Dartrey Fenellan admired this commanding figure of a woman, who could not legally say that which the woman he admired less, if at all, legally could say.

‘I must leave you to interpret,’ Nataly remarked.

Mrs. Blathenoy resented her unbefitting queenly style.  For this reason, she abstained from an intended leading up to mention of the ‘singular-looking lady’ seen riding with Miss Radnor more than once; and as to whom, Miss Radnor (for one gives her the name) had not just now, when questioned, spoken very clearly.  So the mother’s alarms were not raised.

And really it was a pity, Mrs. Blathenoy said to Dartrey subsequently; finding him colder than before Mrs. Radnor’s visit; it was a pity, because a young woman in Miss Radnor’s position should not by any possibility be seen in association with a person of commonly doubtful appearance.

She was denied the petulant satisfaction of rousing the championship bitter to her.  Dartrey would not deliver an opinion on Miss Radnor’s conduct.  He declined, moreover, to assist in elucidating the telegram by ‘looking here,’ and poring over the lines beside a bloomy cheek.  He was petulantly whipped on the arm with her glove, and pouted at.  And it was then—­and then only or chiefly through Nataly’s recent allusion—­that the man of honour had his quakings in view of the quagmire, where he was planted on an exceedingly narrow causeway, not of the firmest.  For she was a pretty little woman, one of the prize gifts of the present education of women to the men who are for having them quiescent domestic patterns; and her artificial ingenuousness or candid frivolities came to her by nature to kindle the nature of the gentleman on the other bank of the stream, and witch him to the plunge, so greatly mutually regretted after taken:  an old duet to the moon.