’But piecemeal, in extension, so slowly.  I go to him a derelict, bearing a story of the sea; empty of ideas.  I remember sailing out of harbour passably well freighted for commerce.’

’When Tom Redworth has had command of the “derelict” a week, I should like to see her!’

The mention of that positive captaincy drowned Diana in morning colours.  She was dominated, physically and morally, submissively too.  What she craved, in the absence of the public whiteness which could have caused her to rejoice in herself as a noble gift, was the spring of enthusiasm.  Emma touched a quivering chord of pride with her hint at the good augury, and foreshadowing of the larger Union, in the Irishwoman’s bestowal of her hand on the open-minded Englishman she had learned to trust.  The aureole glimmered transiently:  she could neither think highly of the woman about to be wedded, nor poetically of the man; nor, therefore, rosily of the ceremony, nor other than vacuously of life.  And yet, as she avowed to Emma, she had gathered the three rarest good things of life:  a faithful friend, a faithful lover, a faithful servant:  the two latter exposing an unimagined quality of emotion.  Danvers, on the night of the great day for Redworth, had undressed her with trembling fingers, and her mistress was led to the knowledge that the maid had always been all eye; and on reflection to admit that it came of a sympathy she did not share.

But when Celtic brains are reflective on their emotional vessel they shoot direct as the arrow of logic.  Diana’s glance at the years behind lighted every moving figure to a shrewd transparency, herself among them.  She was driven to the conclusion that the granting of any of her heart’s wild wishes in those days would have lowered her—­or frozen.  Dacier was a coldly luminous image; still a tolling name; no longer conceivably her mate.  Recollection rocked, not she.  The politician and citizen was admired:  she read the man;—­more to her own discredit than to his, but she read him, and if that is done by the one of two lovers who was true to love, it is the God of the passion pronouncing a final release from the shadow of his chains.

Three days antecedent to her marriage, she went down the hill over her cottage chimneys with Redworth, after hearing him praise and cite to Emma Dunstane sentences of a morning’s report of a speech delivered by Dacier to his constituents.  She alluded to it, that she might air her power of speaking of the man coolly to him, or else for the sake of stirring afresh some sentiment he had roused; and he repeated his high opinion of the orator’s political wisdom:  whereby was revived in her memory a certain reprehensible view, belonging to her period of mock-girlish naughtiness—­too vile!—­as to his paternal benevolence, now to clear vision the loftiest manliness.  What did she do?  She was Irish; therefore intuitively decorous in amatory challenges and interchanges.  But she was an impulsive woman, and foliage was thick around, only a few small birds and heaven seeing; and penitence and admiration sprang the impulse.  It had to be this or a burst of weeping:—­she put a kiss upon his arm.