Those marshalled battalions of Debit and Credit were in hostile order, the weaker simply devoted to fighting for delay, when a winged messenger bearing the form of old Mr. Braddock descended to her with the reconciling news that a hermit bachelor, an acquaintance of Mr. Redworth’s—­both of whom wore a gloomy hue in her mind immediately—­had offered a sum for the purchase of The Crossways.  Considering the out-of-the-way district, Mr. Braddock thought it an excellent price to get.  She thought the reverse, but confessed that double the sum would not have altered her opinion.  Double the sum scarcely counted for the service she required of it for much more than a year.  The money was paid shortly after into her Bank, and then she enjoyed the contemptuous felicity of tossing meat to her lions, tigers, wolves, and jackals, who, but for the fortunate intervention, would have been feeding on her.  These menagerie beasts of prey were the lady’s tradesmen, Debit’s hungry-brood.  She had a rapid glimpse of a false position in regarding that legitimate band so scornfully:  another glimpse likewise of a day to come when they might not be stopped at the door.  She was running a race with something; with what?  It was unnamed; it ran in a shroud.

At times she surprised her heart violently beating when there had not been a thought to set it in motion.  She traced it once to the words, ‘next year,’ incidentally mentioned.  ‘Free,’ was a word that checked her throbs, as at a question of life or death.  Her solitude, excepting the hours of sleep, if then, was a time of irregular breathing.  The something unnamed, running beside her, became a dreadful familiar; the race between them past contemplation for ghastliness.  ’But this is your Law!’ she cried to the world, while blinding her eyes against a peep of the shrouded features.

Singularly, she had but to abandon hope, and the shadowy figure vanished, the tragic race was ended.  How to live and think, and not to hope:  the slave of passion had this problem before her.

Other tasks were supportable, though one seemed hard at moments and was not passive; it attacked her.  The men and women of her circle derisively, unanimously, disbelieved in an innocence that forfeited reputation.  Women were complimentarily assumed to be not such gaping idiots.  And as the weeks advanced, a change came over Percy.  The gentleman had grown restless at covert congratulations, hollow to his knowledge, however much caressing vanity, and therefore secretly a wound to it.  One day, after sitting silent, he bluntly proposed to break ’this foolish trifling’; just in his old manner, though not so honourably; not very definitely either.  Her hand was taken.

‘I feared that dumbness!’ Diana said, letting her hand go, but keeping her composure.  ’My friend Percy, I am not a lion-tamer, and if you are of those animals, we break the chapter.  Plainly you think that where there appears to be a choice of fools, the woman is distinctly designed for the person.  Drop my hand, or I shall repeat the fable of the Goose with the Golden Eggs.’