’A friend of mine, spiced with cynic, declares that there’s always an amicable way out of a dissension, if we get rid of Lupus and Vulpus.’

Carling spied for a trap in the citation of Lupus and Vulpus; he saw none, and named the square of his residence on the great Russell property, and the number of the house, the hour of dinner next day.  He then hung silent, breaking the pause with his hand out and a sharp ‘Well?’ that rattled a whirligig sound in his head upward.  His leave of people was taken in this laughing falsetto, as of one affected by the curious end things come to.

Fenellan thought of him for a moment or two, that he was a better than the common kind of lawyer; who doubtless knew as much of the wrong side of the world as lawyers do, and held his knowledge for the being a man of the world:—­as all do, that have not Alpine heights in the mind to mount for a look out over their own and the world’s pedestrian tracks.  I could spot the lawyer in your composition, my friend, to the exclusion of the man he mused.  But you’re right in what you mean to say of yourself:  you’re a good fellow, for a lawyer, and together we may manage somehow to score a point of service to Victor Radnor.

CHAPTER VIII

SOME FAMILIAR GUESTS

Nesta read her mother’s face when Mrs. Victor entered the drawing-room to receive the guests.  She saw a smooth fair surface, of the kind as much required by her father’s eyes as innocuous air by his nostrils:  and it was honest skin, not the deceptive feminine veiling, to make a dear man happy over his volcano.  Mrs. Victor was to meet the friends with whom her feelings were at home, among whom her musical gifts gave her station:  they liked her for herself; they helped her to feel at home with herself and be herself:  a rarer condition with us all than is generally supposed.  So she could determine to be cheerful in the anticipation of an evening that would at least be restful to the outworn sentinel nerve of her heart, which was perpetually alert and signalling to the great organ; often colouring the shows and seems of adverse things for an apeing of reality with too cruel a resemblance.  One of the scraps of practical wisdom gained by hardened sufferers is, to keep from spying at horizons when they drop into a pleasant dingle.  Such is the comfort of it, that we can dream, and lull our fears, and half think what we wish:  and it is a heavenly truce with the fretful mind divided from our wishes.

Nesta wondered at her mother’s complacent questions concerning this Lakelands:  the house, the county, the kind of people about, the features of the country.  Physically unable herself to be regretful under a burden three parts enrapturing her, the girl expected her mother to display a shadowy vexation, with a proud word or two, that would summon her thrilling sympathy in regard to the fourth part:  namely, the aristocratic iciness of country magnates, who took them up and cast them off; as they had done, she thought, at Craye Farm and at Creckholt:  she remembered it, of the latter place, wincingly, insurgently, having loved the dear home she had been expelled from by her pride of the frosty surrounding people—­or no, not all, but some of them.  And what had roused their pride?