to her father. Nataly sighed, foreseeing evil, owning it a superstition,
feeling it a certainty. We are easily prophets, sure of being justified,
when the cleverness of schemes devoted to material ends appears most
delicately perfect. History, the tales of households, the tombstone, are
with us to inspire. In Nataly's bosom, the reproof of her inefficiency
for offering counsel where Victor for his soul's sake needed it, was
beginning to thunder at whiles as a reproach of unfittingness in his
mate, worse than a public denunciation of the sin against Society.

It might be decreed that she and Society were to come to reconcilement.
A pain previously thought of, never previously so realized, seized her at
her next sight of Nesta. She had not taken in her front mind the
contrast of the innocent one condemned to endure the shadow from which
the guilty was by a transient ceremony released. Nature could at a push
be eloquent to defend the guilty. Not a word of vindicating eloquence
rose up to clear the innocent. Nothing that she could do; no
devotedness, not any sacrifice, and no treaty of peace, no possible joy
to come, nothing could remove the shadow from her child. She dreamed of
the succour in eloquence, to charm the ears of chosen juries while a fact
spoke over the population, with a relentless rolling out of its one hard
word. But eloquence, powerful on her behalf, was dumb when referred to
Nesta. It seemed a cruel mystery. How was it permitted by the Merciful
Disposer! . . . Nataly's intellect and her reverence clashed. They
clash to the end of time if we persist in regarding the Spirit of Life as
a remote Externe, who plays the human figures, to bring about this or
that issue, instead of being beside us, within us, our breath, if we
will; marking on us where at each step we sink to the animal, mount to
the divine, we and ours who follow, offspring of body or mind. She was
in her error, from judgeing of the destiny of man by the fate of
individuals. Chiefly her error was, to try to be thinking at all amid