Dorothea loved a hero, but knew she was no heroine.  She called herself a pitiful coward—­unjustly, because, nurtured as she had been on the proprieties, surrounded all her days by men and women of a class most sensitive to public opinion, who feared the breath of scandal worse than a plague, confession for her must mean a shame unspeakable.  What!  Admit that she, Dorothea Westcote, had loved a French prisoner almost young enough to be her son! that she had given him audience at night! that he had been shot and captured beneath her window!

Unjustly, too, she accused herself, because it is the decision, not the terror felt in deciding, which distinguishes the brave from the cowardly.  If you doubt the event with Dorothea, the fault, must be mine.  She was timid, but she came of a race which will endure anything rather than the conscious anguish of doing wrong.

Nor, had her conscience needed them, did it lack reminders.  Narcissus had been persuaded to send the drawings to London to be treated by lithography, a process of which he knew nothing, but to which M. Raoul, during his studies in Paris, had given much attention, and apparently not without making some discoveries—­unimportant perhaps, and such as might easily reward an experimenter in an art not well past its infancy.  At any rate, he had drawn up elaborate instructions for the London firm of printers, and when the proofs arrived with about a third of these instructions neglected and another third misunderstood, Narcissus was at his wits’ end, aghast at the poorness of the impressions, yet not knowing in the least how to correct them.

He gave Dorothea no peace with them.  Evening after evening she was invited to pore upon the drawings over which she and her lover had bent together; to criticise here and offer a suggestion there; while every line revived a memory, inflicted a pang.  What suggestion could she find save the one which must not be spoken?—­to send, fetch the artist back from Dartmoor, and remedy all this, with so much beside!

“But,” urged Narcissus, “you and he spent hours together.  I quite understood that he had explained the process to you, and on the strength of this I gave it too little attention.  Of course, if one could have foreseen—­” He broke off, and added with some testiness:  “I’d give fifty pounds to have the fellow back, if only for ten minutes’ talk.”

“But why couldn’t we?” Dorothea asked suddenly, breathlessly.

They were alone by the table under the bookcase.  On the far side of the hall, before the fire, Endymion dozed after a long day with the partridges.  Narcissus’s words awoke a wild hope.

“But why couldn’t we?” she repeated, her voice scarcely louder than a whisper.

“Well, that’s an idea!” he chuckled.  “Confound the fellow, he imposed on all of us!  If we had only guessed what he intended, we might have signed a petition telling him how necessary he had made himself, and imploring him, for our sakes, to behave like a gentleman.”