They had not been two minutes together when she descended to them.  Yet she saw the girl’s heart brimming, either with some word spoken to her or for joy of an unmaidenly confession.  During dinner they talked, without distressful pauses.  Whatever said, whatever done, was manifestly another drop in Nesta’s foolish happy cup.  Could it be all because Dartrey Fenellan countenanced her acquaintance with that woman?  The mother had lost hold of her.  The tortured mother had lost hold of herself.

Dartrey in the course of the evening, begged to hear the contralto; and Nataly, refusing, was astounded by the admission in her blank mind of the truth of man’s list of charges against her sex, starting from their capriciousness for she could have sung in a crowded room, and she had now a desire for company, for stolid company or giddy, an ocean of it.  This led to her thinking, that the world of serious money-getters, and feasts, and the dance, the luxurious displays, and the reverential Sunday service, will always ultimately prove itself right in opposition to critics and rebels, and to any one vainly trying to stand alone:  and the thought annihilated her; for she was past the age of the beginning again, and no footing was left for an outsider not self-justified in being where she stood.  She heard Dartrey’s praise of Nesta’s voice for tearing her mother’s bosom with notes of intolerable sweetness; and it was haphazard irony, no doubt; we do not the less bleed for the accident of a shot.

At last, after midnight Victor arrived.

Nesta most impudently expected to be allowed to remain.  ‘Pray, go, dear,’ her mother said.  Victor kissed his Fredi.  ‘Some time to-morrow,’ said he; and she forbore to beseech him.

He stared, though mildly, at sight of her taking Dartrey’s hand for the good-night and deliberately putting her lips to it.

Was she a girl whose notion of rectifying one wrong thing done, was to do another?  Nataly could merely observe.  A voice pertaining to no one present, said in her ear:—­Mothers have publicly slapped their daughter’s faces for less than that!—­It was the voice of her incapacity to cope with the girl.  She watched Nesta’s passage from the room, somewhat affected by the simple bearing for which she was reproaching her.

‘And our poor darling has not seen a mountain this year!’ Victor exclaimed, to have mentionable grounds for pitying his girl.  ’I promised Fredi she should never count a year without Highlands or Alps.  You remember, mama?—­down in the West Highlands.  Fancy the dear bit of bundle, Dartrey!—­we had laid her in her bed; she was about seven or eight; and there she lay wide awake.  “What ’s Fredi thinking of?”—­“I’m thinking of the tops of the mountains at night, dada.”—­She could climb them now; she has the legs.’

Nataly said:  ‘You have some report to make.  You dined with those people?’

’The Marsetts:  yes:—­well-suited couple enough.  It’s to happen before Winter ends—­at once; before Christmas; positively before next Spring.  Fredi’s doing!  He has to manage, arrange.—­She’s a good-looking woman, good height, well-rounded; well-behaved, too:  she won’t make a bad Lady Marsett.  Every time that woman spoke of our girl, the tears jumped to her eyelids.’