Had they quarrelled?  He said he had not heard a word of Mrs. Warwick for several months.

‘I—­heard from her this morning,’ said Lady Dunstane, and motioned him to a chair beside the sofa, where she half reclined, closing her eyes.  The sight of tears on the eyelashes frightened him.  She roused herself to look at the clock.  ‘Providence or accident, you are here,’ she said.  ‘I could not have prayed for the coming of a truer’ man.  Mrs. Warwick is in great danger . . . .  You know our love.  She is the best of me, heart and soul.  Her husband has chosen to act on vile suspicions—­ baseless, I could hold my hand in the fire and swear.  She has enemies, or the jealous fury is on the man—­I know little of him.  He has commenced an action against her.  He will rue it.  But she . . . you understand this of women at least;—­they are not cowards in all things! —­but the horror of facing a public scandal:  my poor girl writes of the hatefulness of having to act the complacent—­put on her accustomed self!  She would have to go about, a mark for the talkers, and behave as if nothing were in the air-full of darts!  Oh, that general whisper!—­it makes a coup de massue—­a gale to sink the bravest vessel:  and a woman must preserve her smoothest front; chat, smile—­or else!—­Well, she shrinks from it.  I should too.  She is leaving the country.’

‘Wrong!’ cried Redworth.

’Wrong indeed.  She writes, that in two days she will be out of it.  Judge her as I do, though you are a man, I pray.  You have seen the hunted hare.  It is our education—­we have something of the hare in us when the hounds are full cry.  Our bravest, our best, have an impulse to run.  “By this, poor Wat far off upon a hill.”  Shakespeare would have the divine comprehension.  I have thought all round it and come back to him.  She is one of Shakespeare’s women:  another character, but one of his own:—­another Hermione!  I dream of him—­seeing her with that eye of steady flame.  The bravest and best of us at bay in the world need an eye like his, to read deep and not be baffled by inconsistencies.’

Insensibly Redworth blinked.  His consciousness of an exalted compassion for the lady was heated by these flights of advocacy to feel that he was almost seated beside the sovereign poet thus eulogized, and he was of a modest nature.

‘But you are practical,’ pursued Lady Dunstane, observing signs that she took for impatience.  ’You are thinking of what can be done.  If Lukin were here I would send him to The Crossways without a moment’s delay, on the chance, the mere chance:—­it shines to me!  If I were only a little stronger!  I fear I might break down, and it would be unfair to my husband.  He has trouble enough with my premature infirmities already.  I am certain she will go to The Crossways.  Tony is one of the women who burn to give last kisses to things they love.  And she has her little treasures hoarded there.  She was born there.  Her father died there.  She is three parts Irish—­superstitious in affection.  I know her so well.  At this moment I see her there.  If not, she has grown unlike herself.’