‘My purse, dear Tony!’ exclaimed Emma.  ’My house!  You will stay with me?  Why do you shake your head?  With me you are safe.’  She spied at the shadows in her friend’s face.  ’Ever since your marriage, Tony, you have been strange in your trick of refusing to stay with me.  And you and I made our friendship the pledge of a belief in eternity!  We vowed it.  Come, I do talk sentimentally, but my heart is in it.  I beg you—­all the reasons are with me—­to make my house your home.  You will.  You know I am rather lonely.’

Diana struggled to keep her resolution from being broken by tenderness.  And doubtless poor Sir Lukin had learnt his lesson; still, her defensive instincts could never quite slumber under his roof; not because of any further fear that they would have to be summoned; it was chiefly owing to the consequences of his treacherous foolishness.  For this half-home with her friend thenceforward denied to her, she had accepted a protector, called husband—­rashly, past credence, in the retrospect; but it had been her propelling motive; and the loathings roused by her marriage helped to sicken her at the idea of a lengthened stay where she had suffered the shock precipitating her to an act of insanity.

’I do not forget you were an heiress, Emmy, and I will come to you if I need money to keep my head up.  As for staying, two reasons are against it.  If I am to fight my battle, I must be seen; I must go about—­ wherever I am received.  So my field is London.  That is obvious.  And I shall rest better in a house where my story is not known.’

Two or three questions ensued.  Diana had to fortify her fictitious objection by alluding to her maid’s prattle of the household below; and she excused the hapless, overfed, idle people of those regions.

To Emma it seemed a not unnatural sensitiveness.  She came to a settled resolve in her thoughts, as she said, ’They want a change.  London is their element.’

Feeling that she deceived this true heart, however lightly and necessarily, Diana warmed to her, forgiving her at last for having netted and dragged her back to front the enemy; an imposition of horrors, of which the scene and the travelling with Redworth, the talking of her case with her most intimate friend as well, had been a distempering foretaste.

They stood up and kissed, parting for the night.

An odd world, where for the sin we have not participated in we must fib and continue fibbing, she reflected.  She did not entirely cheat her clearer mind, for she perceived that her step in flight had been urged both by a weak despondency and a blind desperation; also that the world of a fluid civilization is perforce artificial.  But her mind was in the background of her fevered senses, and when she looked in the glass and mused on uttering the word, ‘Liar!’ to the lovely image, her senses were refreshed, her mind somewhat relieved, the face appeared so sovereignly defiant of abasement.