‘I beg you will not distress my mother,’ said Nesta.

‘I beg to know whether this correspondence is to continue?’ said Dudley.

‘All my life, if I do not feel dishonoured by it.’

‘You are.’  He added hastily:  ’Counsels of prudence—­there is not a lady living who would tell you otherwise.  At all events, in public opinion, if it were known—­and it would certainly be known,—­a lady, wife or spinster, would suffer—­would not escape the—­at least shadow of defilement from relationship, any degree of intimacy with . . . hard words are wholesome in such a case:  “touch pitch,” yes!  My sense is coherent.’

‘Quite,’ said Nesta.

‘And you do not agree with me?’

‘I do not.’

‘Do you pretend to be as able to judge as I?’

‘In this instance, better.’

’Then I retire.  I cannot retain my place here.  You may depend upon it, the world is not wrong when it forbids young ladies to have cognizance of women leading disorderly lives.’

‘Only the women, Mr. Sowerby?’

‘Men, too, of course.’

‘You do not exclude the men from Society.’

‘Oh! one reads that kind of argument in books.’

‘Oh! the worthy books, then.  I would read them, if I could find them.’

‘They are banned by self-respecting readers.’

‘It grieves me to think differently.’

Dudley looked on this fair girl, as yet innocent girl; and contrasting her with the foulness of the subject she dared discuss, it seemed to him, that a world which did not puff at her and silence, if not extinguish, was in a state of liquefaction.

Remembering his renewed repentances his absence, he said:  ’I do hope you may come to see, that the views shared by your mother and me are not erroneous.’

‘But do not distress her,’ Nesta implored him.  ’She is not well.  When she has grown stronger, her kind heart will move her to receive the lady, so that she may not be deprived of the society of good women.  I shall hope she will not disapprove of me.  I cannot forsake a friend.’

‘I beg to say good-bye,’ said Dudley.

She had seen a rigidity smite him as she spoke; and so little startling was it, that she might have fancied it expected, save for her knowing herself too serious to have played at wiles to gain her ends.

He ‘wished her prudent advisers.’

She thanked him.  ‘In a few days, Louise de Seilles will be here.’

A Frenchwoman and Papist! was the interjection of his twist of brows.

Surely I must now be free? she thought when he had covered his farewell under a salutation regretful in frostiness.

A week later, she had the embrace of her Louise, and Armandine was made happy with a piece of Parisian riband.

Winter was rapidly in passage:  changes were visible everywhere; Earth and House of Commons and the South London borough exhibited them; Mrs. Burman was the sole exception.  To the stupefaction of physicians, in a manner to make a sane man ask whether she was not being retained as an instrument for one of the darker purposes of Providence—­and where are we standing if we ask such things?—­she held on to her thread of life.