‘Do you see any possibility?—­you knew her,’ she said coldly.

’Counting the number of times he has been expecting the release, he is bound to believe it near at hand.’

‘You don’t?’ she asked:  her bosom was up in a crisis of expectation for the answer:  and on a pause of half-a-minute, she could have uttered the answer herself.

He perceived the insane eagerness through her mask, and despised it, pitying the woman.  ‘And you don’t,’ he said.  ’You catch at delusions, to excuse the steps you consent to take.  Or you want me to wear the blinkers, the better to hoodwink your own eyes.  You see it as well as I:  If you enter that house, you have to go through the same as at Creckholt:—­and he’ll be the first to take fright.’

’He finds you in tears:  he is immensely devoted; he flings up all to protect “his Nataly."’

’No:  you are unjust to him.  He would fling up all:’—­

‘But his Nataly prefers to be dragged through fire?  As you please!’

She bowed to her chastisement.  One motive in her consultation with him came of the knowledge of his capacity to inflict it and his honesty in the act, and a thirst she had to hear the truth loud-tongued from him; together with a feeling that he was excessive and satiric, not to be read by the letter of his words:  and in consequence, she could bear the lash from him, and tell her soul that he overdid it, and have an unjustly-treated self to cherish.—­But in very truth she was a woman who loved to hear the truth; she was formed to love the truth her position reduced her to violate; she esteemed the hearing it as medical to her; she selected for counsellor him who would apply it:  so far she went on the straight way; and the desire for a sustaining deception from the mouth of a trustworthy man set her hanging on his utterances with an anxious hope of the reverse of what was to come and what she herself apprehended, such as checked her pulses and iced her feet and fingers.  The reason being, not that she was craven or absurd or paradoxical, but that, living at an intenser strain upon her nature than she or any around her knew, her strength snapped, she broke down by chance there where Colney was rendered spiteful in beholding the display of her inconsequent if not puling sex.

She might have sought his counsel on another subject, if a paralyzing chill of her frame in the foreview of it had allowed her to speak:  she felt grave alarms in one direction, where Nesta stood in the eye of her father; besides an unformed dread that the simplicity in generosity of Victor’s nature was doomed to show signs of dross ultimately, under the necessity he imposed upon himself to run out his forecasts, and scheme, and defensively compel the world to serve his ends, for the protection of those dear to him.