All was explained save his consequent rightabout from the chemist’s shop:  and that belongs to the minor involutions of circumstances and the will.  It passed like a giver’s wrinkle.  He read the placards of the Opera; reminding himself of the day when it was the single Opera-house; and now we have two-or three.  We have also a distracting couple of Clowns and Pantaloons in our Pantomimes:  though Colney says that the multiplication of the pantaloon is a distinct advance to representative truth—­and bother Colney!  Two Columbines also.  We forbear to speak of men, but where is the boy who can set his young heart upon two Columbines at once!  Victor felt the boy within him cold to both:  and in his youth he had doated on the solitary twirling spangled lovely Fairy.  The tale of a delicate lady dancer leaping as the kernel out of a nut from the arms of Harlequin to the legalized embrace of a wealthy brewer, and thenceforth living, by repute, with unagitated legs, as holy a matron, despite her starry past, as any to be shown in a country breeding the like abundantly, had always delighted him.  It seemed a reconcilement of opposing stations, a defeat of Puritanism.  Ay, and poor women!—­women in the worser plight under the Puritan’s eye.  They may be erring and good:  yes, finding the man to lift them the one step up!  Read the history of the error.  But presently we shall teach the Puritan to act by the standards of his religion.  All is coming right—­must come right.  Colney shall be confounded.

Hereupon Victor hopped on to Fenellan’s hint regarding the designs of Mrs. Burman.

His Nataly might have to go through a short sharp term of scorching—­Godiva to the gossips.

She would come out of it glorified.  She would be reconciled with her family.  With her story of her devotion to the man loving her, the world would know her for the heroine she was:  a born lady, in appearance and manner an empress among women.  It was a story to be pleaded in any court, before the sternest public.  Mrs. Burman had thrown her into temptation’s way.  It was a story to touch the heart, as none other ever written of over all the earth was there a woman equalling his Nataly!

And their Nesta would have a dowry to make princesses envious:—­she would inherit . . . he ran up an arithmetical column, down to a line of figures in addition, during three paces of his feet.  Dartrey Fenellan had said of little Nesta once, that she had a nature pure and sparkling as mid-sea foam.  Happy he who wins her!  But she was one of the young women who are easily pleased and hardly enthralled.  Her father strained his mind for the shape of the man to accomplish the feat.  Whether she had an ideal of a youth in her feminine head, was beyond his guessing.  She was not the damsel to weave a fairy waistcoat for the identical prince, and try it upon all comers to discover him:  as is done by some; excuseably, if we would be just.  Nesta was of the elect, for whom excuses have not to be made.  She would probably like a flute-player best; because her father played the flute, and she loved him—­laughably a little maiden’s reason!  Her father laughed at her.