Wariness counselled him to think it might be merely the play of her youth; and also the disposition of a man in harness of business, exaggeratingly to prize an imagined finding of the complementary feminine of himself.  Venerating purity as he did, the question, whether the very sweetest of pure young women, having such an origin, must not at some time or other show trace of the origin, surged up.  If he could only have been sure of her moral exemption from taint, a generous ardour, in reserve behind his anxious dubieties, would have precipitated Dudley to quench disapprobation and brave the world under a buckler of those monetary advantages, which he had but stoutly to plead with the House of Cantor, for the speedy overcoming of a reluctance to receive the nameless girl and prodigious heiress.  His family’s instruction of him, and his inherited tastes, rendered the aspect of a Nature stripped of the clothing of the laws offensive down to devilish:  we grant her certain steps, upon certain conditions accompanied by ceremonies; and when she violates them, she becomes visibly again the revolutionary wicked old beast bent on levelling our sacredest edifices.  An alliance with any of her votaries, appeared to Dudley as an act of treason to his house, his class, and his tenets.  And nevertheless he was haunted by a cry of criminal happiness for and at the commission of the act.

He would not decide to be ‘precipitate,’ and the days ran their course, until Lady Grace Halley arrived at Cronidge, a widow.  Lady Cantor spoke to her of Dudley’s unfathomable gloom.  Lady Grace took him aside.

She said, without preface:  ‘You’ve heard, have you!’

‘You were aware of it?’ said he, and his tone was irritable with a rebuke.

’Coming through town, for the first time yesterday.  I had it—­of all men!—­from a Sir Abraham Quatley, to whom I was recommended to go, about my husband’s shares in a South American Railway; and we talked, and it came out.  He knows; he says, it is not generally known; and he likes, respects Mr. Victor Radnor; we are to keep the secret.  Hum?  He had heard of your pretensions; and our relationship, etc.:  “esteemed” it—­you know the City dialect—­his duty to mention, etc.  That was after I had spied on his forehead the something I wormed out of his mouth.  What are you going to do?’

‘What can I do!’

‘Are you fond of the girl?’

An attachment was indicated, as belonging to the case.  She was not a woman to whom the breathing of pastoral passion would be suitable; yet he saw that she despised him for a lover; and still she professed to understand his dilemma.  Perplexity at the injustice of fate and persons universally, put a wrinkled mask on his features and the expression of his feelings.  They were torn, and the world was torn; and what he wanted, was delay, time for him to define his feelings and behold a recomposed picture of the world.  He had already taken six days.  He pleaded the shock to his family.