hout a change of countenance.

She could not have wished it the reverse; she was exonerated. But she was
not free; far from that; and she revenged herself on the friends who made
much of her triumph and overlooked her plight, by showing no sign of
satisfaction. There was in her bosom a revolt at the legal consequences
of the verdict--or blunt acquiescence of the Law in the conditions
possibly to be imposed on her unless she went straight to the relieving
phial; and the burden of keeping it under, set her wildest humour alight,
somewhat as Redworth remembered of her on the journey from The Crossways
to Copsley. This ironic fury, coming of the contrast of the outer and the
inner, would have been indulged to the extent of permanent injury to her
disposition had not her beloved Emma, immediately after the tension of
the struggle ceased, required her tenderest aid. Lady Dunstane chanted
victory, and at night collapsed. By the advice of her physician she was
removed to Copsley, where Diana's labour of anxious nursing restored her
through love to a saner spirit. The hopefulness of life must bloom again
in the heart whose prayers are offered for a life dearer than its own to
be preserved. A little return of confidence in Sir Lukin also refreshed
her when she saw that the poor creature did honestly, in his shaggy rough
male fashion, reverence and cling to the flower of souls he named as his
wife. His piteous groans of self-accusation during the crisis haunted
her, and made the conduct and nature of men a bewilderment to her still
young understanding. Save for the knot of her sensations (hardly a mental
memory, but a sullen knot) which she did not disentangle to charge him
with his complicity in the blind rashness of her marriage, she might have
felt sisterly, as warmly as she compassionated him.

It was midwinter when Dame Gossip, who keeps the exotic world alive with
her fanning whispers, related that the lovely Mrs. Warwick had left
England on board the schooner-yacht Clarissa, with Lord and Lady Esquart,
for a voyage in the Mediterranean: and (behind her hand) that the reason
was urgent, inasmuch as she fled to escape the meshes of the terrific net
of the marital law brutally whirled to capture her by the man her
husband.

CHAPTER XV

INTRODUCES THE HON. PERCY DACIER

The Gods of this world's contests, against whom our poor stripped
individual is commonly in revolt, are, as we know, not miners, they are
reapers; an