Victor’s reflections came across Colney Durance, who tripped and stopped them.

Dressed with his customary celerity, he waited for Nesta, to show her the lighted grand double drawing-room:  a further proof of how Fortune favoured him:  she was to be told, how he one day expressed a wish for greater space, and was informed on the next, that the neighbour house was being vacated, and the day following he was in treaty for the purchase of it; returning from Tyrol, he found his place habitable.

Nesta came.  Her short look at him was fond, her voice not faltering; she laid her hand under his arm and walked round the spacious room, praising the general design, admiring the porcelain, the ferns, friezes, hangings, and the grand piano, the ebony inlaid music-stands, the firegrates and plaques, the ottomans, the tone of neutral colour that, as in sound, muted splendour.  He told her it was a reception night, with music:  and added:  ‘I miss my . . . seen anybody lately?’

‘Mr. Sowerby?’ said she.  ’He was to have escorted me back.  He may have overslept himself.’

She spoke it plainly; when speaking of the dear good ladies, she set a gentle humour at play, and comforted him, as she intended, with a souvenir of her lively spirit, wanting only in the manner of gaiety.

He allowed, that she could not be quite gay.

More deeply touched the next minute, he felt in her voice, in her look, in her phrasing of speech, an older, much older daughter than the Fredi whom he had conducted to Moorsedge.  ‘Kiss me,’ he said.

She turned to him full-front, and kissed his right cheek and left, and his forehead, saying:  ‘My love! my papa! my own dear dada!’ all the words of her girlhood in her new sedateness; and smiling:  like the moral crepuscular of a sunlighted day down a not totally inanimate Sunday Londen street.

He strained her to his breast.  ‘Mama soon be here?’

‘Soon.’

That was well.  And possibly at the present moment applying, with her cunning hand, the cosmetics and powders he could excuse for a concealment of the traces of grief.

Satisfied in being a superficial observer, he did not spy to see more than the world would when Nataly entered the dining-room at the quiet family dinner.  She performed her part for his comfort, though not prattling; and he missed his Fredi’s delicious warble of the prattle running rill-like over our daily humdrum.  Simeon Fenellan would have helped.  Then suddenly came enlivenment:  a recollection of news in the morning’s paper.  ’No harm before Fredi, my dear.  She’s a young woman now.  And no harm, so to speak-at least, not against the Sanfredini.  She has donned her name again, and a villa on Como, leaving her ’duque’;—­paragraph from a Milanese musical Journal; no particulars.  Now, mark me, we shall have her at Lakelands in the Summer.  If only we could have her now!’

‘It would be a pleasure,’ said Nataly.  Her heart had a blow in the thought, that a lady of this kind would create the pleasure by not bringing criticism.