‘Between us, surely?’

’My whole heart thanks you for your goodness to me.  I am unable to say more.’

He had again observed and he slightly crisped under the speculative look she directed on him:  a simple unstrained look, that had an air of reading right in, and was worse to bear with than when the spark leaped upon some thought from her eyes:  though he had no imagination of anything he concealed—­or exposed, and he would have set it down to her temporary incredulousness of his perfect generosity or power to overcome the world’s opinion of certain circumstances.  That had been a struggle!  The peculiar look was not renewed.  She spoke warmly of her gratitude.  She stated, that she must of necessity see her parents at once.  She submitted to his entreaty to conduct her to them on the morrow.  It was in the manner of one who yielded step by step, from inability to contend.

Her attitude continuing unchanged, he became sensible of a monotony in the speech with which he assailed it, and he rose to leave, not dissatisfied.  She, at his urgent request, named her train for London in the early morning.  He said it was not too early.  He would have desired to be warmed; yet he liked her the better for the moral sentiment controlling the physical.  He had appointments with relatives or connections in the town, and on that pretext he departed, hoping for the speedy dawn of the morrow as soon as he had turned his back on the house.

No, not he the man to have pity of women underfoot!  That was the thought, unrevolved, unphrased, all but unconscious, in Nesta:  and while her heart was exalting him for his generosity.  Under her present sense of the chilling shadow, she felt the comfort there was in being grateful to him for the golden beams which his generosity cast about her.  But she had an intelligence sharp to pierce, virgin though she was; and with the mark in sight, however distant, she struck it, unerring as an Artemis for blood of beasts:  those shrewd young wits, on the lookout to find a champion, athirst for help upon a desolate road, were hard as any judicial to pronounce the sentence upon Dudley in that respect.  She raised him high; she placed herself low; she had a glimpse of the struggle he had gone through; love of her had helped him, she believed.  And she was melted; and not the less did the girl’s implacable intuition read with the keenness of eye of a man of the world the blunt division in him, where warm humanity stopped short at the wall of social concrete forming a part of this rightly esteemed young citizen.  She, too, was divided:  she was at his feet; and she rebuked herself for daring to judge—­or rather, it was, for having a reserve in her mind upon a man proving so generous with her.  She was pulled this way and that by sensibilities both inspiring to blind gratitude and quickening her penetrative view.  The certainty of an unerring perception remained.

Dorothea and Virginia were seated in the room below, waiting for their carriage, when the hall-door spoke of the Hon. Dudley’s departure; soon after, Nesta entered to them.  She swam up to Dorothea’s lap, and dropped her head on it, kneeling.