Emma took the place of Danvers in the office of the robing, for the maid, as her mistress managed to hint, was too steeped ’in the colour of the occasion’ to be exactly tasteful, and had the art, no doubt through sympathy, of charging permissible common words with explosive meanings:—­ she was in an amorous palpitation, of the reflected state.  After several knockings and enterings of the bedchamber-door, she came hurriedly to say:  ‘And your pillow, ma’am?  I had almost forgotten it!’ A question that caused her mistress to drop the gaze of a moan on Emma, with patience trembling.  Diana preferred a hard pillow, and usually carried her own about.  ‘Take it,’ she had to reply.

The friends embraced before descending to step into the fateful carriage.  ‘And tell me,’ Emma said, ‘are not your views of life brighter to-day?’

’Too dazzled to know!  It may be a lamp close to the eyes or a radiance of sun.  I hope they are.’

‘You are beginning to think hopefully again?’

’Who can really think, and not think hopefully?  You were in my mind last night, and you brought a little boat to sail me past despondency of life and the fear of extinction.  When we despair or discolour things, it is our senses in revolt, and they have made the sovereign brain their drudge.  I heard you whisper; with your very breath in my ear:  “There is nothing the body suffers that the soul may not profit by.”  That is Emma’s history.  With that I sail into the dark; it is my promise of the immortal:  teaches me to see immortality for us.  It comes from you, my Emmy.’

If not a great saying, it was in the heart of deep thoughts:  proof to Emma that her Tony’s mind had resumed its old clear high-aiming activity; therefore that her nature was working sanely, and that she accepted her happiness, and bore love for a dower to her husband.  No blushing confession of the woman’s love of the man would have told her so much as the return to mental harmony with the laws of life shown in her darling’s pellucid little sentence.

She revolved it long after the day of the wedding.  To Emma, constantly on the dark decline of the unillumined verge, between the two worlds, those words were a radiance and a nourishment.  Had they waned she would have trimmed them to feed her during her soul-sister’s absence.  They shone to her of their vitality.  She was lying along her sofa, facing her South-western window, one afternoon of late November, expecting Tony from her lengthened honeymoon trip, while a sunset in the van of frost, not without celestial musical reminders of Tony’s husband, began to deepen; and as her friend was coming, she mused on the scenes of her friend’s departure, and how Tony, issuing from her cottage porch had betrayed her feelings in the language of her sex by stooping to lift above her head and kiss the smallest of her landlady’s children ranged up the garden-path to bid her farewell over their strewing of flowers;—­and of her