‘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.

But those were times of weakness.  Let anything be doubted rather than the good guidance of the man who was her breath of life!  Whither he led, let her go, not only submissively, exultingly.

Thus she thought, under pressure of the knowledge, that unless rushing into conflicts bigger than conceivable, she had to do it, and should therefore think it.

This was the prudent woman’s clear deduction from the state wherein she found herself, created by the one first great step of the mad woman.  Her surrender then might be likened to the detachment of a flower on the river’s bank by swell of flood:  she had no longer root of her own; away she sailed, through beautiful scenery, with occasionally a crashing fall, a turmoil, emergence from a vortex, and once more the sunny whirling surface.  Strange to think, she had not since then power to grasp in her abstract mind a notion of stedfastness without or within.

But, say not the mad, say the enamoured woman.  Love is a madness, having heaven’s wisdom in it—­a spark.  But even when it is driving us on the breakers, call it love:  and be not unworthy of it, hold to it.  She and Victor had drunk of a cup.  The philtre was in her veins, whatever the directions of the rational mind.