r delivered a brilliant speech in
the House of Commons, necessarily pleasing to his uncle: Lord Larrian
obtained the command of the Rock: the house of The Crossways was let
to a tenant approved by Mr. Braddock: Diana received the opening
proof-sheets of her little volume, and an instalment of the modest
honorarium: and finally, the Plaintiff in the suit involving her name
was adjudged to have not proved his charge.

She heard of it without 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 La