's supper.'

She was not acting the shiver of her frame.

To-morrow was open to him, and prospect of better fortune, so he
departed, after squeezing the hand she ceremoniously extended.

But her woman's intuition warned her that she had not maintained the
sovereign impression which was her security. And hope had become a flame
in her bosom that would no longer take the common extinguisher. The race
she ran was with a shrouded figure no more, but with the figure of the
shroud; she had to summon paroxysms of a pity hard to feel, images
of sickness, helplessness, the vaults, the last human silence for the
stilling of her passionate heart. And when this was partly effected, the
question, Am I going to live? renewed her tragical struggle. Who was
it under the vaults, in the shroud, between the planks? and with human
sensibility to swell the horror! Passion whispered of a vaster sorrow
needed for herself; and the hope conjuring those frightful complexities
was needed to soothe her. She pitied the man, but she was an enamoured
woman. Often of late she had been sharply stung, relaxed as well, by the
observations of Danvers assisting at her toilette. Had she beauty
and charm, beauty and rich health in the young summer blooming of
her days?--and all doomed to waste? No insurgency of words arose in
denunciation of the wrong done to her nature. An undefined heavy feeling
of wrong there was, just perceptive enough to let her know, without
gravely shaming, that one or another must be slain for peace to come;
for it is the case in which the world of the Laws overloading her is
pitiless to women, deaf past ear-trumpets, past intercession; detesting
and reviling them for a feeble human cry, and for one apparent step of
revolt piling the pelted stones on them. It will not discriminate
shades of hue, it massacres all the shadowed. They are honoured, after
a fashion, at a certain elevation. Descending from it, and purely to
breathe common air (thus in her mind), they are scourged and outcast.
And alas! the very pleading for them excites a sort of ridicule in
their advocate. How? She was utterly, even desperately, nay personally,
earnest, and her humour closed her lips; though comical views of the
scourged and outcast coming from the opposite party--the huge bully
world--she would not have tolerated. Diana raged at a prevailing
strength on the part of that huge bully world, which seemed really to
embrace the atmosphere. Emma had said: 'Th