had leisure to rouse their heads against a beggar of a mortal.  The terrible sugariness which poured into him worked like venom to cause an encounter and a wrestling:  his battery of jaws expressed it.  They gaped.  At the same time, his eyeballs gave up.  All the Dog, that would have barked the breathing intruder an hundredfold back to earth, was one compulsory centurion yawn.  Tears, issue of the frightful internal wedding of the dulcet and the sour (a ravishing rather of the latter by the former), rolled off his muzzles.

Now, if you are not for insisting that a magnificent simile shall be composed of exactly the like notes in another octave, you will catch the fine flavour of analogy and be wafted in a beat of wings across the scene of the application of the Rev. Septimus Barmby to Mr. Victor Radnor, that he might enter the house in the guise of suitor for the hand of Nesta Victoria.  It is the excelling merit of similes and metaphors to spring us to vault over gaps and thickets and dreary places.  But, as with the visits of Immortals, we must be ready to receive them.  Beware, moreover, of examining them too scrupulously:  they have a trick of wearing to vapour if closely scanned.  Let it be gratefully for their aid.

So far the comparison is absolute, that Mr. Barmby passed:  he was at liberty to pursue his quest.

Victor could not explain how he had been brought to grant it.  He was at pains to conceal the bewilderment Mr. Barmby had cast on him, and make Nataly see the smallness of the grant:—­both of them were unwilling to lose Barmby; there was not the slightest fear about Fredi, he said; and why should not poor Barmby have his chance with the others in the race!—­and his Nataly knew that he hated to speak unkindly:  he could cry the negative like a crack of thunder in the City.  But such matters as these! and a man pleading merely for the right to see the girl!—­and pleading in a tone . . .  ‘I assure you, my love, he touched chords.’

‘Did he allude to advantages in the alliance with him?’ Nataly asked smoothly.

’His passion—­nothing else.  Candid enough.  And he had a tone—­he has a tone, you know.  It ’s not what he said.  Some allusion to belief in a favourable opinion of him . . . encouragement . . . on the part of the mama.  She would have him travelling with us!  I foresaw it.’

‘You were astonished when it came.’

‘We always are.’

Victor taunted her softly with having encouraged Mr. Barmby.

She had thought in her heart—­not seriously; on a sigh of despondency—­that Mr. Barmby espousing the girl would smooth a troubled prospect:  and a present resentment at her weakness rendered her shrewd to detect Victor’s cunning to cover his own:  a thing imaginable of him previously in sentimental matters, yet never accurately and so legibly printed on her mind.  It did not draw her to read him with a novel familiarity; it drew her to be more