Lakelands.’  The smile and the tear rolled together in Nesta reading these words.  And her father spoke repeatedly of longing to embrace his Fredi, of the joy her last letter had given him, of his intention to send an immediate answer:  and he showed Dudley a pile of manuscript ready for the post.  He talked of public affairs, was humorous over any extravagance or eccentricity in the views he took; notably when he alluded to his envy of little Skepsey.  He said he really did envy; and his daughter believed it and saw fair prospects in it.

Her grateful reply to the young earl conveyed all that was perforce ungentle, in the signature of the name of Nesta Victoria Fenellan:—­a name he was to hear cited among the cushioned conservatives, and plead for as he best could under a pressure of disapprobation, and compelled esteem, and regrets.

The day following the report of her father’s wish to see her, she and her husband started for England.  On that day, Victor breathed his last.  Dudley had seen the not hopeful but an ominous illumination of the stricken man; for whom came the peace his Nataly had in earth.  Often did Nesta conjure up to vision the palpitating form of the beloved mother with her hand at her mortal wound in secret through long years of the wearing of the mask to keep her mate inspirited.  Her gathered knowledge of things and her ruthless penetrativeness made it sometimes hard for her to be tolerant of a world, whose tolerance of the infinitely evil stamped blotches on its face and shrieked in stains across the skin beneath its gallant garb.  That was only when she thought of it as the world condemning her mother.  She had a husband able and ready, in return for corrections of his demon temper, to trim an ardent young woman’s fanatical overflow of the sisterly sentiments; scholarly friends, too, for such restrainings from excess as the mind obtains in a lamp of History exhibiting man’s original sprouts to growth and fitful continuation of them.  Her first experience of the grief that is in pleasure, for those who have passed a season, was when the old Concert-set assembled round her.  When she heard from the mouth of a living woman, that she had saved her from going under the world’s waggon-wheels, and taught her to know what is actually meant by the good living of a shapely life, Nesta had the taste of a harvest happiness richer than her recollection of the bride’s, though never was bride in fuller flower to her lord than she who brought the dower of an equal valiancy to Dartrey Fenellan.  You are aware of the reasons, the many, why a courageous young woman requires of high heaven, far more than the commendably timid, a doughty husband.  She had him; otherwise would that puzzled old world, which beheld her step out of the ranks to challenge it, and could not blast her personal reputation, have commissioned a paw to maul her character, perhaps instructing the gossips to murmur of her parentage.  Nesta Victoria Fenellan had the husband who would have the world respectful to any brave woman.  This one was his wife.