‘With a husband who’d reduce Minerva’s to tinder, after a month of him!’

‘He spent his honeymoon at his place at Wrensham; told me so.’  Blathenoy had therefore then heard of the building of Lakelands by the Victor Radnor of the City; and had then, we guess—­in the usual honeymoon boasting of a windbag with his bride—­wheezed the foul gossip, to hide his emptiness and do duty for amusement of the pretty little caged bird.  Probably so.  But Victor knew that Blathenoy needed him and feared him.  Probably the wife had been enjoined to keep silence; for the Blachingtons, Fannings and others were, it could be sworn, blank and unscratched folio sheets on the subject:—­as yet; unless Mrs. Burman had dropped venom.

‘One pities the little woman, eh, Fenellan?’

’Dartrey won’t be back for a week or so; and they’re off to Switzerland, after the dinner they give.  I heard from him this morning; one of the Clanconans is ill.

’Lucky.  But wherever Blathenoy takes her, he must be the same “arid bore,” as old Colney says.’

‘A domestic simoom,’ said Fenellan, booming it:  and Victor had a shudder.

’Awful thing, marriage, to some women!  We chain them to that domestic round; most of them haven’t the means of independence or a chance of winning it; and all that’s open to them, if they’ve made a bad cast for a mate—­and good Lord! how are they to know before it’s too late!—­they haven’t a choice except to play tricks or jump to the deuce or sit and “drape in blight,” as Colney has it; though his notion of the optional marriages, broken or renewed every seven years!—­if he means it.  You never know, with him.  It sounds like another squirt of savage irony.  It’s donkey nonsense, eh?’

‘The very hee-haw of nonsense,’ Fenellan acquiesced.

‘Come, come; read your Scriptures; donkeys have shown wisdom,’ Victor said, rather leaning to the theme of a fretfulness of women in the legal yoke.  ’They’re donkeys till we know them for prophets.  Who can tell!  Colney may be hailed for one fifty years hence.’

Fenellan was not invited to enter the house, although the loneliness of his lodgeings was known, and also, that he played whist at his Club.  Victor had grounds for turning to him at the door and squeezing his hand warmly, by way of dismissal.  In ascribing them to a weariness at Fenellan’s perpetual acquiescence, he put the cover on them, and he stamped it with a repudiation of the charge, that Colney’s views upon the great Marriage Question were the ‘very hee-haw of nonsense.’  They were not the hee-haw; in fact, viewing the host of marriages, they were for discussion; there was no bray about them.  He could not feel them to be absurd while Mrs. Burman’s tenure of existence barred the ceremony.  Anything for a phrase! he murmured of Fenellan’s talk; calling him, Dear old boy, to soften the slight.

Nataly had not seen Fenellan or heard from Dartrey; so she continued to be uninformed of her hero’s release; and that was in the order of happy accidents.  She had hardly to look her interrogation for the news; it radiated.  But he stated such matter-of-course briefly.  ’The good ladies are ready to receive our girl.’