!’ Mr. Barmby paused on his outroll of the word; but immediately, not intending to weigh down his gentle hearer with the significance in it, resumed at a yet more sonorous depth:  ’He is under the obligation to his family; an old, a venerable family.  In the full blaze of public opinion!  His conduct can be palliated by us, too.  There is a right and wrong in minor things, independent of the higher rectitude.  We pardon, we can partly support, the worldly view.’

‘There is a shadow?’ said Nesta; and her voice was lurefully encouraging.

He was on the footing where men are precipitated by what is within them to blunder.  ’On you—­no.  On you personally, not at all.  No.  It could not be deemed so.  Not by those knowing, esteeming—­not by him who loves you, and would, with his name, would, with his whole strength, envelop, shield . . . certainly, certainly not.’

‘It is on my parents?’ she said.

’But to me nothing, nothing, quite nought!  To confound the innocent with the guilty! . . . and excuses may exist.  We know but how little we know!’

‘It is on both my parents?’ she said; with a simplicity that induced him to reply:  ‘Before the world.  But not, I repeat . . .’

The band-instruments behind the sheltering glass flourished on their termination of a waltz.

She had not heeded their playing.  Now she said: 

‘The music is over; we must not be late at lunch’; and she stood up and moved.

He sprang to his legs and obediently stepped out: 

‘I shall have your answer to-day, this evening?  Nesta!’

’Mr. Barmby, it will be the same.  You will be kind to me in not asking me again.’

He spoke further.  She was dumb.

Had he done ill or well for himself and for her when he named the shadow on her parents?  He dwelt more on her than on himself:  he would not have wounded her to win the blest affirmative.  Could she have been entirely ignorant?—­and after Dudley Sowerby’s defection?  For such it was:  the Rev. Stuart Rem had declared the union between the almost designated head of the Cantor family and a young person of no name, of worse than no birth, impossible:  ‘absolutely and totally impossible,’ he, had said, in his impressive fashion, speaking from his knowledge of the family, and an acquaintance with Dudley.  She must necessarily have learnt why Dudley Sowerby withdrew.  No parents of an attractive daughter should allow her to remain unaware of her actual position in the world.  It is criminal, a reduplication of the criminality!  Yet she had not spoken as one astonished.  She was mysterious.  Women are so:  young women most of all.  It is undecided still whether they do of themselves conceive principles, or should submit to an imposition of the same upon them in terrorem.  Mysterious truly, but most attractive!  As Lady Bountiful of a district, she would have in her maturity the majestic stature to suit a dispensation of earthly good things.  And, strangely, here she was, at this moment, rivalling to excelling all others of her sex (he verified it in the crowd of female faces passing), when they, if they but knew the facts, would visit her very appearance beside them on a common footing as an intrusion and a scandal.  To us who know, such matters are indeed wonderful!