Her heart was weak that night.  She hovered above it, but not so detached as to scorn it for fawning to one—­any one—­who would offer her and her mother a cover from scorn.  And now she exalted Dudley’s generosity, now clung to a low idea of a haven in her father’s wealth; and she was unaware, that the second mood was deduced from the first.  She did know herself cowardly:  she had, too, a critic in her clear head, to spurn at the creature who could think of purchasing the world’s respect.  Dudley’s generosity sprang up to silence the voice.  She could praise him, on a review of it, for delicacy, moreover; and the delicacy laid her under a more positive obligation.  Her sense of it was not without a toneless quaint faint savour of the romantic, that her humour little humorously caught at, to paint her a picture of former heroes of fiction, who win their trying lady by their perfection of good conduct on a background of high birth; and who are not seen to be wooden before the volume closes.  Her fatigue of sleeplessness plunged her into the period of poke-bonnets and peaky hats to admire him; giving her the kind of sweetness we may imagine ourselves to get in the state of tired horse munching hay.  If she had gone to her bed with a noble or simply estimable plain image of one of her friends in her heart, to sustain it, she would not have been thus abject.  Skepsey’s discoloured eye, and Captain Dartrey’s behaviour behind it, threw her upon Dudley’s generosity, as being the shield for an outcast.  Girls, who see at a time of need their ideal extinguished in its appearing tarnished, are very much at the disposal of the pressing suitor.  Nesta rose in the black winter morn, summoning the best she could think of to glorify Dudley, that she might not feel so doomed.

According to an agreement overnight, she went to the bedroom of Dorothea and Virginia, to assure them of her having slept well, and say the good-bye to them and their Tasso.  The little dog was the growl of a silken ball in a basket.  His mistresses excused him, because of his being unused to the appearance of any person save Manton in their bedroom.  Dorothea, kissing her, said:  ’Adieu, dear child; and there is home with us always, remember.  And, after breakfast, however it may be, you will, for our greater feeling of security, have—­she has our orders—­Manton—­your own maid we consider too young for a guardian—­to accompany you.  We will not have it on our consciences, that by any possibility harm came to you while you were under our charge.  The good innocent girl we received from the hands of your father, we return to him; we are sure of that.’

Nesta said:  ‘Mr. Sowerby promised he would come.’

‘However it may be,’ Dorothea repeated her curtaining phrase.