Then came sighs.  The sad old servant in her bosom was resuming his labours.

But she had been near it—­very near it?  A gush of pity for Victor, overwhelmed her hardness of mind.

Unreflectingly, she tried her feet to support her, and tottered to the door, touched along to the stairs, and descended them, thinking strangely upon such a sudden weakness of body, when she would no longer have thought herself the weak woman.  Her aim was to reach the library.  She sat on the stairs midway, pondering over the length of her journey:  and now her head was clearer; for she was travelling to get Railway-guides, and might have had them from the hands of a footman, and imagined that she had considered it prudent to hide her investigation of those books:  proofs of an understanding fallen backward to the state of infant and having to begin our drear ascent again.

A slam of the kitchen stair-door restored her.  She betrayed no infirmity of footing as she walked past Arlington in the hall; and she was alive to the voice of Skepsey presently on the door-steps.  Arlington brought her a note.

Victor had written:  ’My love, I dine with Blathenoy in the City, at the Walworth.  Business.  Skepsey for clothes.  Eight of us.  Formal.  A thousand embraces.  Late.’

Skepsey was ushered in.  His wife had expired at noon, he said; and he postured decorously the grief he could not feel, knowing that a lady would expect it of him.  His wife had fallen down stone steps; she died in hospital.  He wished to say, she was no loss to the country; but he was advised within of the prudence of abstaining from comment and trusting to his posture, and he squeezed a drop of conventional sensibility out of it, and felt improved.

Nataly sent a line to Victor:  ’Dearest, I go to bed early, am tired.  Dine well.  Come to me in the morning.’

She reproached herself for coldness to poor Skepsey, when he had gone.  The prospect of her being alone until the morning had been so absorbing a relief.

She found a relief also in work at the book of the trains.  A walk to the telegraph-station strengthened her.  Especially after despatching a telegram to Mr. Dudley Sowerby at Cronidge, and one to Nesta at Moorsedge, did she become stoutly nerved.  The former was requested to meet her at Penhurst station at noon.  Nesta was to be at the station for the Wells at three o’clock.

From the time of the flying of these telegrams, up to the tap of Victor’s knuckle on her bed-room door next morning, she was not more reflectively conscious than a packet travelling to its destination by pneumatic tube.  Nor was she acutely impressionable to the features and the voice she loved.

‘You know of Skepsey?’ she said.

‘Ah, poor Skepsey!’ Victor frowned and heaved.

‘One of us ought to stand beside him at the funeral.’

‘Colney or Fenellan?’

‘I will ask Mr. Durance.’