‘You pushed for the best society, like a fish to its native sea.’

‘Pray say, a salmon to the riverheads.’

‘Better,’ Redworth laughed joyfully, between admiration of the tongue that always outflew him, and of the face he reddened.

By degrees her apter and neater terms of speech helped her to a notion of regaining some steps of her sunken ascendancy, under the weight of the novel masculine pressure on her throbbing blood; and when he bent to her to take her lord’s farewell of her, after agreeing to go and delight Emma with a message, her submission and her personal pride were not so much at variance:  perhaps because her buzzing head had no ideas.  ’Tell Emma you have undertaken to wash the blackamoor as white as she can be,’ she said perversely, in her spite at herself for not coming, as it were, out of the dawn to the man she could consent to wed:  and he replied:  ’I shall tell her my dark girl pleads for a fortnight’s grace before she and I set sail for the West coast of Ireland’:  conjuring a picture that checked any protest against the shortness of time:—­and Emma would surely be his ally.

They talked of the Dublin Ball:  painfully to some of her thoughts.  But Redworth kissed that distant brilliant night as freshly as if no belabouring years rolled in the chasm:  which led her to conceive partly, and wonderingly, the nature of a strong man’s passion; and it subjugated the woman knowing of a contrast.  The smart of the blow dealt her by him who had fired the passion in her became a burning regret for the loss of that fair fame she had sacrificed to him, and could not bring to her truer lover:  though it was but the outer view of herself—­the world’s view; only she was generous and of honest conscience, and but for the sake of her truer lover, she would mentally have allowed the world to lash and abuse her, without a plea of material purity.  Could it be named?  The naming of it in her clear mind lessened it to accidental:—­ By good fortune, she was no worse!—­She said to Redworth, when finally dismissing him; ’I bring no real disgrace to you, my friend.’—­To have had this sharp spiritual battle at such a time, was proof of honest conscience, rarer among women, as the world has fashioned them yet, than the purity demanded of them.—­His answer:  ‘You are my wife!’ rang in her hearing.

When she sat alone at last, she was incapable, despite her nature’s imaginative leap to brightness, of choosing any single period, auspicious or luminous or flattering, since the hour of her first meeting this man, rather than the grey light he cast on her, promising helpfulness, and inspiring a belief in her capacity to help.  Not the Salvatore high raptures nor the nights of social applause could appear preferable:  she strained her shattered wits to try them.  As for her superlunary sphere, it was in fragments; and she mused on the singularity, considering that she was not deeply enamoured.  Was she so at all?