daughter Nesta Victoria: a glorious trio when her mother Natalia, sweet
lily that she was, shook the rainwater from her cup and followed the good
example to shine in the sun.

He had a secret for them.

Nesta's promising soprano, and her mother's contralto, and his baritone
--a true baritone, not so well trained as their accurate notes--should
be rising in spirited union with the curtain of that secret: there was
matter for song and concert, triumph and gratulation in it. And during
the whole passage of the bridge, he had not once cast thought on a secret
so palpitating, the cause of the morning's expedition and a long year's
prospect of the present day! It seemed to have been knocked clean out of
it--punctilioed out, Fenellan might say. Nor had any combinations upon
the theme of business displaced it. Just before the fall, the whole
drama of the unfolding of that secret was brilliant to his eyes as a
scene on a stage.

He refused to feel any sensible bruise on his head, with the admission
that he perhaps might think he felt one which was virtually no more than
the feeling of a thought;--what his friend Dr. Peter Yatt would define as
feeling a rotifer astir in the curative compartment of a homoeopathic
globule: and a playful fancy may do that or anything. Only, Sanity does
not allow the infinitely little to disturb us.

Mr. Radnor had a quaint experience of the effects of the infinitely
little while threading his way to a haberdasher's shop for new white
waistcoats. Under the shadow of the representative statue of City
Corporations and London's majesty, the figure of Royalty, worshipful in
its marbled redundancy, fronting the bridge, on the slope where the seas