rounded object in the smothering darkness to look at, he could nowhere
take moorings to gather himself together and define the man who had
undergone so portentous a defeat. He was glad of quarters at an hotel,
a solitary bed, absence from his Nataly.

For their parts, the ladies were not less shattered. They had no triumph
in their victory: the weight of it bore them down. They closed, locked,
shot the bolts and fastened the chain of the door. They had to be
reminded by the shaking of their darling dog Tasso's curly silky coat,
that he had not taken his evening's trot to notify malefactors of his
watchfulness and official wrath at sound of footfall or a fancied one.
Without consultation, they unbolted the door, and Tasso went forth, to
'compose his vesper hymn,' as Mr. Posterley once remarked amusingly.

Though not pretending to the Muse's crown so far, the little dog had
qualities to entrance the spinster sex. His mistresses talked of him;
of his readiness to go forth; of the audible first line of his hymn or
sonnet; of his instinct telling him that something was wrong in the
establishment. For most of the servants at Moorsedge were prostrated by
a fashionable epidemic; a slight attack, the doctor said; but Montague,
the butler, had withdrawn for the nursing of his wife; Perrin, the
footman, was confined to his chamber; Manton, the favourite maid, had
appeared in the morning with a face that caused her banishment to bed;
and the cook, Mrs. Bannister, then sighingly agreed to send up cold meat
for the ladies' dinner. Hence their melancholy inhospitality to their
cousin Victor, who had, in spite of his errors, the right to claim his
place at their table, was 'of the blood,' they said. He was recognized
as the living prince of it. His every gesture, every word, recalled the
General. The trying scene with him had withered them, they did not speak
of it; each had to the other the look of a vessel that has come out of a