shut his mind
against thought, against all meditation upon Mrs. Warwick; it was
based scientifically when speculating and calculating, on the material
element--a talisman. Men and women crossing the high seas of life he had
found most readable under that illuminating inquiry, as to their means.
An inspector of sea worthy ships proceeds in like manner. Whence would
the money come? He could not help the bent of his mind; but he could
avoid subjecting her to the talismanic touch. The girl at the Dublin
Ball, the woman at the fire-grate of The Crossways, both in one were his
Diana. Now and then, hearing an ugly whisper, his manful sympathy with
the mere woman in her imprisoned liberty, defended her desperately
from charges not distinctly formulated within him:--'She's not made of
stone.' That was a height of self-abnegation to shake the poor fellow
to his roots; but, then, he had no hopes of his own; and he stuck to it.
Her choice of a man like Dacier, too, of whom Redworth judged highly,
showed nobility. She irradiated the man; but no baseness could be in
such an alliance. If allied, they were bound together for good. The
tie--supposing a villain world not wrong--was only not the sacred tie
because of impediments. The tie!--he deliberated, and said stoutly--No.
Men of Redworth's nature go through sharp contests, though the duration
of them is short, and the tussle of his worship of this woman with the
materialistic turn of his mind was closed by the complete shutting up
of the latter under lock and bar; so that a man, very little of an
idealist, was able to sustain her in the pure imagination--where she did
almost belong to him. She was his, in a sense, because she might have
been his--but for an incredible extreme of folly. The dark ring of the
eclipse cast by some amazing foolishness round the shining crescent
perpetually in secret claimed the whole sphere of her, by what might
have been, while admitting her lost to him in fact. To Thomas Redworth's
mind the lack of perfect sanity in his conduct at any period of manhood,
was so entirely past belief that he flew at the circumstances confirming
the charge, and had wrestles with the angel of reality, who did but set
him dreaming backward, after flinging him.

He heard at Lady Wathin's that Mrs. Warwick was in town for the winter.
'Mr. Dacier is also in town,' Lady Wathin said, with an acid indication
of the needless mention of it. 'We have not seen him.' She invited
Redwor