She had thought in her heart--not seriously; on a sigh of despondency--
that Mr. Barmby espousing the girl would smooth a troubled prospect: and
a present resentment at her weakness rendered her shrewd to detect
Victor's cunning to cover his own: a thing imaginable of him previously
in sentimental matters, yet never accurately and so legibly printed on
her mind. It did not draw her to read him with a novel familiarity; it
drew her to be more sensible of foregone intimations of the man he was
--irresistible in attack, not impregnably defensive. Nor did he seem in
this instance humanely considerate: if mademoiselle's estimate of the
mind of the girl was not wrong, then Mr. Barmby's position would be both
a ridiculous and a cruel one. She had some silly final idea that the
poor man might now serve permanently to check the more dreaded applicant:
a proof that her ordinary reflectiveness was blunted.

Nataly acknowledged, after rallying Victor for coming to have his
weakness condoned, a justice in his counter-accusation, of a loss of her
natural cheerfulness, and promised amendment, with a steely smile, that
his lips mimicked fondly; and her smile softened. To strengthen the dear
soul's hopes, he spoke, as one who had received the latest information,
of Dr. Themison and surgeons; little conscious of the tragic depths he
struck or of the burden he gave her heart to bear. Her look alarmed him.
She seemed to be hugging herself up to the tingling scalp, and was in a
moment marble to sight and touch. She looked like the old engravings of
martyrs taking the bite of the jaws of flame at the stake.

He held her embraced, feeling her body as if it were in the awful grip of
fingers from the outside of life.

The seizure was over before it could be called ominous. When it was once
over, and she had smiled again and rebuked him for excessive anxiety, his