The cry came of her pride unbroken, sore bruised, and after a certain space for recovery combative.  She said: 

Any expiation I could offer where I did injury, I would not refuse; I would humble myself and bless heaven for being able to pay my debt—­what I can of it.  All I contend against is, injustice.  And she sank into sensational protests of her anxious care of her daughter, too proud to phrase them.

Her one great affliction, the scourging affliction of her utter loneliness;—­an outcast from her family; daily, and she knew not how, more shut away from the man she loved; now shut away from her girl;—­seemed under the hand of the angel of God.  The abandonment of her by friends, was merely the light to show it.

Midday’s post brought her a letter from Priscilla Graves, entreating to be allowed to call on her next day.—­We are not so easily cast off!  Nataly said, bitterly, in relation to the lady whose offending had not been so great.  She wrote:  ‘Come, if sure that you sincerely wish to.’

Having fasted, she ate at lunch in her dressing-room, with some taste of the food, haunted by an accusation of gluttony because of her eating at all, and a vile confession, that she was enabled to eat, owing to the receipt of Priscilla’s empty letter:  for her soul’s desire was to be doing a deed of expiation, and the macerated flesh seemed her assurance to herself of the courage to make amends.—­I must have some strength, she said wearifully, in apology for the morsel consumed.

Nesta’s being in the house with her, became an excessive irritation.  Doubts of the girl’s possible honesty to speak a reptile truth under question; amazement at her boldness to speak it; hatred of, the mouth that could:  and loathing of the words, the theme; and abomination of herself for conjuring fictitious images to rouse real emotions; all ran counterthreads, that produced a mad pattern in the mind, affrighting to reason:  and then, for its preservation, reason took a superrational leap, and ascribed the terrible injustice of this last cruel stroke to the divine scourge, recognized divine by the selection of the mortal spot for chastisement.  She clasped her breast, and said:  It is mortal.  And that calmed her.

She said, smiling:  I never felt my sin until this blow came!  Therefore the blow was proved divine.  Ought it not to be welcomed?—­and she appearing no better than one of those, the leprous of the sex!  And brought to acknowledgement of the likeness by her daughter!

Nataly drank the poison distilled from her exclamations and was ice.  She had denied herself to Nesta’s redoubled petition.  Nesta knocking at the door a third time and calling, tore the mother two ways:  to have her girl on her breast or snap their union in a word with an edge.  She heard the voice of Dartrey Fenellan.

He was admitted.  ‘No, dear,’ she said to Nesta; and Nesta’s, ’My own mother,’ consentingly said, in tender resignation, as she retired, sprang a stinging tear to the mother’s eyelids.