Of one thing they were sure, and it enlisted them:  the gentleman loved the girl.  Her love of him, had it been prominent to view, would have stirred a feminine sigh; not more, except a feminine lecture to follow.  She was quite uninflamed, fresh and cool as a spring.  His ardour had no disguise.  They measured him by the favourite fiction’s heroes of their youth, and found him to gaze, talk, comport himself, according to the prescription; correct grammar, finished sentences, all that is expected of a gentleman enamoured; and ever with the watchful intentness for his lady’s faintest first dawn of an inclining to a wish.  Mr. Dudley Sowerby’s eye upon Nesta was really an apprentice.  There is in Love’s young season a magnanimity in the male kind.  Their superior strength and knowledge are made subservient to the distaff of the weaker and shallower:  they crown her queen; her look is their mandate.  So was it when Sir Charles and Sir Rupert and the estimable Villiers Davenant touched maidenly hearts to throb:  so is it now, with the Hon. Dudley Sowerby.

Very haltingly, the ladies were guilty of a suggestion to Victor.  ’Oh!  Fredi?’ said he; ’admires her, no doubt; and so do I, so we all do; she’s one of the nice girls; but as to Cupid’s darts, she belongs to the cucumber family, and he shoots without fireing.  We shall do the mischief if we put an interdict.  Don’t you remember the green days when obstacles were the friction to light that match?’ Their pretty nod of assent displayed the virgin pride of the remembrance:  they dreamed of having once been exceedingly wilful; it refreshed their nipped natures; and dwelling on it, they forgot to press their suggestion.  Incidentally, he named the sum his Fredi would convey to her husband; with, as was calculable, the further amount his only child would inherit.  A curious effect was produced on them.  Though they were not imaginatively mercenary, as the creatures tainted with wealth commonly are, they talked of the sum over and over in the solitude of their chamber.  ’Dukes have married for less.’  Such an heiress, they said, might buy up a Principality.  Victor had supplied them with something of an apology to the gentleman proposing to Nesta in their house.

The chronicle of it is, that Dudley Sowerby did this on the fifteenth day of September; and that it was not known to the damsel’s parents before the twenty-third; as they were away on an excursion in South Tyrol:—­away, flown, with just a word of the hurried departure to their envious, exiled girl; though they did not tell her of new constructions at the London house partly causing them to fly.  Subject to their consent, she wrote, she had given hers.  The letter was telegramic on the essential point.  She wrote of Mr. Barmby’s having visited Mr. Posterley at the Wells, and she put it just as flatly.  Her principal concern, to judge by her writing, was, to know what Mr. Durance had done, during her absence, with the group of emissary-advocates of the various tongues of Europe on board the steam-Liner conducting them the first stage of their journey to the Court of Japan.