Victor rubbed hands.  It was he who filled Colney’s bag of satiric spite.  In addition to the downright lunacy of the courting of country society, by means of the cajolements witnessed this day, a suspicion that Victor was wearing a false face over the signification—­of Jarniman’s visit and meant to deceive the trustful and too-devoted loving woman he seemed bound to wreck, irritated the best of his nature.  He had a resolve to pass an hour with the couple, and speak and insist on hearing plain words before the night had ended.  But Fenellan took it out of him.  Victor’s show of a perfect contentment emulating Pempton’s, incited Colney to some of his cunning rapier-thrusts with his dancing adversary; and the heat which is planted in us for the composition:  of those cool epigrams, will not allow plain words to follow.  Or, handing him over to the police of the Philistines, you may put it, that a habit of assorting spices will render an earnest simplicity distasteful.  He was invited by Nataly to come home with them; her wish for his presence, besides personal, was moved by an intuition, that his counsel might specially benefit them.  He shrugged; he said he had work at his chambers.

‘Work!’ Victor ejaculated:  he never could reach to a right comprehension of labour, in regard to the very unremunerative occupation of literature.  Colney he did not want, and he let him go, as Nataly noticed, without a sign of the reluctance he showed when the others, including Fenellan, excused themselves.

‘So! we’re alone?’ he said, when the door of the hall had closed on them.  He kept Nesta talking of the success of the day until she, observing her mother’s look, simulated the setting-in of a frenzied yawn.  She was kissed, and she tripped to her bed.

‘Now we are alone,’ Nataly said.

’Well, dear, and the day was, you must own . . . ’ he sought to trifle with her heavy voice; but she recalled him:  ‘Victor!’ and the naked anguish in her cry of his name was like a foreign world threatening the one he filled.

’Ah, yes; that man, that Jarniman.  You saw him, I remember.  You recollected him?—­stouter than he was.  In her service ever since.  Well, a little drop of bitter, perhaps:  no harm, tonic.’

‘Victor, is she very ill?’

’My love, don’t feel at your side:  she is ill, ill, not the extreme case:  not yet:  old and ill.  I told Skepsey to give the man refreshment:  he had to do his errand.’

‘What? why did he come?’

’Curious; he made acquaintance with Skepsey, and appears to have outwitted poor Skepsey, as far as I see it.  But if that woman thinks of intimidating me now—!’ His eyes brightened; he had sprung from evasions.  ’Living in flagrant sin, she says:  you and I!  She will not have it; warns me.  Heard this day at noon of company at Lakelands.  Jarniman off at once.  Are to live in obscurity;—­you and I! if together!  Dictates from her death-bed-I suppose her death-bed.’