nd must writhe and yearn and
feel we are driven mad, and can find no help but only to follow and
look at her, yards away, or crush to one's lips a rag of ribband or a
flower, or pace the night away before her darkened house while she lies
asleep. He is the finest man-thing I have ever known--and yet there is
no other way for him--and he will walk there half the night, his throat
full of mad sobs, which he does not know for sobs, because he is not
woman but tortured man."

Many a night the same figure had walked there in the darkness. As his
great friend had said, there was no other way. His pain had grown no
less, but only more as the months passed by, for it was not the common
pain of a man like others. As he was taller, stronger, and had more
brain and heart than most, he had greater and keener pangs to do battle
with, and in the world he must at intervals be thrown across her path
and she across his, and as he had been haunted by talk and rumours of
her in the years before he was haunted now. 'Twas but natural all
should praise to him his kinsman's wife, sure that he would feel
pleasure when he heard her lauded.

Women, especially such as are great ladies, have not at their command,
if they hide pain in secret, even the refuges and poor comforts
possessed by men. They may not feed their hungry souls by gazing at a
distance upon the beloved object of their heavy thoughts; they cannot
pace the night through before a dwelling, looking up as they pass at
the darkened windows behind which sleeps--or wakes--the creature their
hearts cry to in their pain; tears leave traces; faces from which
smiles are absent, eyes from which light has fled, arouse query and
comment. My lord has a certain privacy and license to be dull or
gloomy, but my lady cannot well be either without explaining herself,
either by calling in a physician or wearing mourning, or allowing the
world to gain some hint of domestic trouble or misfortune.

Her ladyship of Dunstanwolde was surely a happy woman. Having known
neither gayety nor luxury in her girlhood, it seemed now that she could
give her lord no greater pleasure than to allow him to surround her
with both.

"She is more dazzling than they said," my Lord Marlborough thought,
watching her at the tragedy one night, "but she carries with her a
thought of something she would forget in the gayeties of the world."

The Duke of Osmonde sate in his own box that night and in the course of
the play wen