to Nesta, dismissing her and taking her kiss of comfort with a short and
straining look out of the depths.

Those bitter doubts of the sentiments of neighbours are an incipient
dislike, when one's own feelings to the neighbours are kind, could be
affectionate. We are distracted, perverted, made strangers to ourselves
by a false position.

She heard his voice on a carol. Men do not feel this doubtful position
as women must. They have not the same to endure; the world gives them
land to tread, where women are on breaking seas. Her Nesta knew no more
than the pain of being torn from a home she loved. But now the girl was
older, and if once she had her imagination awakened, her fearful
directness would touch the spot, question, bring on the scene to-come,
necessarily to come, dreaded much more than death by her mother. But
if it might be postponed till the girl was nearer to an age of grave
understanding, with some knowledge of our world, some comprehension of a
case that could be pleaded!

He sang: he never acknowledged a trouble, he dispersed it; and in her
present wrestle with the scheme of a large country estate involving new
intimacies, anxieties, the courtship of rival magnates, followed by the
wretched old cloud, and the imposition upon them to bear it in silence
though they knew they could plead a case, at least before charitable and
discerning creatures or before heaven, the despondent lady could have
asked whether he was perfectly sane.

Who half so brilliantly!--Depreciation of him, fetched up at a stroke the
glittering armies of her enthusiasm. He had proved it; he proved it
daily in conflicts and in victories that dwarfed emotional troubles like