‘But, Victor, I must ask,’ Nataly said:  ’you have it through Simeon Fenellan; you have not yourself received the letter from her lawyer?’

’My knowledge of what she would do near the grave—­poor soul, yes!  I shall soon be hearing.’

‘You do not, propose to enter this place until—­until it is over?’

’We enter this place, my love, without any sort of ceremony.  We live there independently, and we can we have quarters there for our friends.  Our one neighbour is London—­there!  And at Lakelands we are able to entertain London and wife;—­our friends, in short; with some, what we have to call, satellites.  You inspect the house and grounds to-morrow—­sure to be fair.  Put aside all but the pleasant recollections of Craye and Creckholt.  We start on a different footing.  Really nothing can be simpler.  Keeping your town-house, you are now and then in residence at Lakelands, where you entertain your set, teach them to feel the charm of country life:  we have everything about us; could have had our own milk and cream up to London the last two months.  Was it very naughty?—­I should have exploded my surprise!  You will see, you will see to-morrow.’

Nataly nodded, as required.  ‘Good news from the mines?’ she said.

He answered:  ’Dartrey is—­yes, poor fellow!  Dartrey is confident, from the yield of stones, that the value of our claim counts in a number of millions.  The same with the gold.  But gold-mines are lodgeings, not homes.’

’Oh, Victor! if money . . . !  But why did you say “poor fellow” of Dartrey Fenellan?’

‘You know how he’s . . .’

‘Yes, yes,’ she said hastily.  ’But has that woman been causing fresh anxiety?’

‘And Natata’s chief hero on earth is not to be named a poor fellow,’ said he, after a negative of the head on a subject they neither of them liked to touch.

Then he remembered that Dartrey Fenellan was actually a lucky fellow; and he would have mentioned the circumstance confided to him by Simeon, but for a downright dread of renewing his painful fit of envy.  He had also another, more distant, very faint idea, that it had better not be mentioned just yet, for a reason entirely undefined.

He consulted his watch.  The maid had come in for the robeing of her mistress.  Nataly’s mind had turned to the little country cottage which would have given her such great happiness.  She raised her eyes to him; she could not check their filling; they were like a river carrying moonlight on the smooth roll of a fall.

He loved the eyes, disliked the water in them.  With an impatient, ’There, there!’ and a smart affectionate look, he retired, thinking in our old satirical vein of the hopeless endeavour to satisfy a woman’s mind without the intrusion of hard material statements, facts.  Even the best of women, even the most beautiful, and in their moments of supremest beauty, have this gross ravenousness for facts.  You must not expect to appease them unless you administer solids.  It would almost appear that man is exclusively imaginative and poetical; and that his mate, the fair, the graceful, the bewitching, with the sweetest and purest of natures, cannot help being something of a groveller.