feeling of the hopelessness of pleading Nesta's conduct, for the perfect
justification of it to son or daughter of our impressing conventional
world--even to a friend, that friend a true man, a really chivalrous man
--drove him back in a silence upon his natural brotherhood with souls
that dare do. It was a wonder, to think of his finding this kinship in a
woman. In a girl?--and the world holding that virgin spirit to be
unclean or shadowed because its rays were shed on foul places? He
clasped the girl. Her smitten clear face, the face of the second sigh
after torture, bent him in devotion to her image.

The clasping and the worshipping were independent of personal ardours:
quaintly mixed with semi-paternal recollections of the little 'blue
butterfly' of the days at Craye. Farm and Creckholt; and he had heard of
Dudley Sowerby's pretensions to; her hand. Nesta's youthfulness cast
double age on him from the child's past. He pictured the child; pictured
the girl, with her look of solitariness of sight; as in the desolate wide
world, where her noble compassion for a woman had unexpectedly,
painfully, almost by transubstantiation, rack-screwed her to woman's
mind. And above sorrowful, holy were those eyes.

They held sway over Dartrey, and lost it some steps on; his demon temper
urgeing him to strike at Major Worrell, as the cause of her dismayed
expression. He was not the happier for dropping to his nature; but we
proceed more easily, all of us, when the strain which lifts us a foot or
two off our native level is relaxed.




CHAPTER XXXIII