Her mother breathed a little moan:  ‘Not a cottage?’

‘He has not mentioned it to Mr. Durance.’

‘Why not?’

‘Mr. Fenellan has been his confidant.’

’My darling, we did wrong to let it go on, without speaking.  You don’t know for certain yet?’

‘It’s a large estate, mama, and a big new house.’

Nataly’s bosom sank.  ’Ah me! here’s misery!  I ought to have known.  And too late now it has gone so far!  But I never imagined he would be building.’

She caught herself languishing at her toilette-glass, as, if her beauty were at stake; and shut her eyelids angrily.  To be looking in that manner, for a mere suspicion, was too foolish.  But Nesta’s divinations were target-arrows; they flew to the mark.  Could it have been expected that Victor would ever do anything on a small scale?  O the dear little lost lost cottage!  She thought of it with a strain of the arms of womanhood’s longing in the unblessed wife for a babe.  For the secluded modest cottage would not rack her with the old anxieties, beset her with suspicions. . . .

‘My child, you won’t possibly have time before the dinner-hour,’ she said to Nesta, dismissing her and taking her kiss of comfort with a short and straining look out of the depths.

Those bitter doubts of the sentiments of neighbours are an incipient dislike, when one’s own feelings to the neighbours are kind, could be affectionate.  We are distracted, perverted, made strangers to ourselves by a false position.

She heard his voice on a carol.  Men do not feel this doubtful position as women must.  They have not the same to endure; the world gives them land to tread, where women are on breaking seas.  Her Nesta knew no more than the pain of being torn from a home she loved.  But now the girl was older, and if once she had her imagination awakened, her fearful directness would touch the spot, question, bring on the scene to-come, necessarily to come, dreaded much more than death by her mother.  But if it might be postponed till the girl was nearer to an age of grave understanding, with some knowledge of our world, some comprehension of a case that could be pleaded!

He sang:  he never acknowledged a trouble, he dispersed it; and in her present wrestle with the scheme of a large country estate involving new intimacies, anxieties, the courtship of rival magnates, followed by the wretched old cloud, and the imposition upon them to bear it in silence though they knew they could plead a case, at least before charitable and discerning creatures or before heaven, the despondent lady could have asked whether he was perfectly sane.

Who half so brilliantly!—­Depreciation of him, fetched up at a stroke the glittering armies of her enthusiasm.  He had proved it; he proved it daily in conflicts and in victories that dwarfed emotional troubles like hers:  yet they were something to bear, hard to bear, at times unbearable.