abasement on their behalf, which was her scourged pride of sex.  She but faintly thought of blaming the men whom her soul besought for justice, for common kindness, to women.  There was the danger, that her aroused young ignorance would charge the whole of the misery about and abroad upon the stronger of those two:  and another danger, that the vision of the facts below the surface would discolour and disorder her views of existence.  But she loved, she sprang to, the lighted world; and she had figures of male friends, to which to cling; and they helped in animating glorious historical figures on the world’s library-shelves or under yet palpitating earth.  Promise of a steady balance of her nature, too, was shown in the absence of any irritable urgency to be doing, when her bosom bled to help.  Beyond the resolve, that she would not abandon the woman who had made confession to her, she formed no conscious resolutions.  Far ahead down her journey of the years to come, she did see muffled things she might hope and would strive to do.  They were chrysalis shapes.  Above all, she flew her blind quickened heart on the wings of an imaginative force; and those of the young who can do that, are in their blood incorruptible by dark knowledge, irradiated under darkness in the mind.  Let but the throb be kept for others.  That is the one secret, for redemption; if not for preservation.

Victor descended on his marine London to embrace his girl, full of regrets at Fredi’s absence from the great whirl ‘overhead,’ as places of multitudinous assembly, where he shone, always appeared to him.  But it was not to last long; she would soon be on the surface again!  At the first clasp of her, he chirped some bars of her song.  He challenged her to duet before the good ladies, and she kindled, she was caught up by his gaiety, wondering at herself; faintly aware of her not being spontaneous.  And she made her father laugh, just in the old way; and looked at herself in his laughter, with the thought, that she could not have become so changed; by which the girl was helped to jump to her humour.  Victor turned his full front to Dorothea and Virginia, one sunny beam of delight and although it was Mr. Stuart Rem who was naughty Nesta’s victim, and although it seemed a trespass on her part to speak in such a manner of a clerical gentleman, they were seized; they were the opposite partners of a laughing quadrille, lasting till they were tired out.

Victor had asked his girl, if she sang on a Sunday.  The ladies remembered, that she had put the question for permission to Mr. Stuart Rem, who was opposed to secular singing.

‘And what did he say?’ said Victor.

Nesta shook her head:  ’It was not what he said, papa; it was his look.  His duty compelled him, though he loves music.  He had the look of a Patriarch putting his handmaiden away into the desert.’

Dorothea and Virginia, in spite of protests within, laughed to streams.  They recollected the look; she had given the portrait of Mr. Stuart Rem in the act of repudiating secular song.