The ladies feared she might be weeping.  Dorothea patted her thick brown twisted locks of hair.  Unhappiness following such an interview, struck them as an ill sign.

Virginia bent to the girl’s ear, and murmured:  ‘All well?’

She replied:  ‘He has been very generous.’

Her speaking of the words renewed an oppression, that had darkened her on the descent of stairs.  For sensibilities sharp as Nesta’s, are not to be had without their penalties:  and she who had gone nigh to summing in a flash the nature of Dudley, sank suddenly under that affliction often besetting the young adventurous mind, crushing to young women:—­the fascination exercised upon them by a positive adverse masculine attitude and opinion.  Young men know well what it is:  and if young women have by chance overcome their timidity, to the taking of any step out of the trim pathway, they shrink, with a sense of forlornest isolation.  It becomes a subjugation; inciting to revolt, but a heavy weight to cast off.  Soon it assumed its material form for the contention between her and Dudley, in the figure of Mrs. Marsett.  The Nesta who had been instructed to know herself to be under a shadow, heard, she almost justified Dudley’s reproaches to her, for having made the acquaintance of the unhappy woman, for having visited her, for having been, though but for a minute, at the mercy of a coarse gentleman’s pursuit.  The recollection was a smart buffet.

Her lighted mind punished her thus through her conjuring of Dudley’s words, should news of her relations with Mrs. Marsett reach him:—­and she would have to tell him.  Would he not say:  ’I have borne with the things concerning your family.  All the greater reason why I must insist’—­he would assuredly say he insisted (her humour caught at the word, as being the very word one could foresee and clearly see him uttering in a fit of vehemence) on her immediate abandonment of ‘that woman.’

And with Nesta’s present enlightenment by dusky beams, upon her parentage, she listened abjectly to Dudley, or the opinion of the majority.  Would he not say or think, that her clinging to Mrs. Marsett put them under a kind of common stamp, or gave the world its option to class them together?

These were among the ideas chasing in a head destined to be a battle-field for the enrichment of a harvest-field of them, while the girl’s face was hidden on Dorothea’s lap, and her breast heaved and heaved.

She distressed them when she rose, by saying she must instantly see her mother.

They saw the pain their hesitation inflicted, and Dorothea said:  ’Yes, dear; any day you like.’

‘To-morrow—­I must go to her to-morrow!’

A suggestion of her mother’s coming down, was faintly spoken by one lady, echoed in a quaver by the other.

Nesta shook her head.  To quiet the kind souls, she entreated them to give their promise that they would invite her again.