She heard of it without a change of countenance.

She could not have wished it the reverse; she was exonerated.  But she was not free; far from that; and she revenged herself on the friends who made much of her triumph and overlooked her plight, by showing no sign of satisfaction.  There was in her bosom a revolt at the legal consequences of the verdict—­or blunt acquiescence of the Law in the conditions possibly to be imposed on her unless she went straight to the relieving phial; and the burden of keeping it under, set her wildest humour alight, somewhat as Redworth remembered of her on the journey from The Crossways to Copsley.  This ironic fury, coming of the contrast of the outer and the inner, would have been indulged to the extent of permanent injury to her disposition had not her beloved Emma, immediately after the tension of the struggle ceased, required her tenderest aid.  Lady Dunstane chanted victory, and at night collapsed.  By the advice of her physician she was removed to Copsley, where Diana’s labour of anxious nursing restored her through love to a saner spirit.  The hopefulness of life must bloom again in the heart whose prayers are offered for a life dearer than its own to be preserved.  A little return of confidence in Sir Lukin also refreshed her when she saw that the poor creature did honestly, in his shaggy rough male fashion, reverence and cling to the flower of souls he named as his wife.  His piteous groans of self-accusation during the crisis haunted her, and made the conduct and nature of men a bewilderment to her still young understanding.  Save for the knot of her sensations (hardly a mental memory, but a sullen knot) which she did not disentangle to charge him with his complicity in the blind rashness of her marriage, she might have felt sisterly, as warmly as she compassionated him.

It was midwinter when Dame Gossip, who keeps the exotic world alive with her fanning whispers, related that the lovely Mrs. Warwick had left England on board the schooner-yacht Clarissa, with Lord and Lady Esquart, for a voyage in the Mediterranean:  and (behind her hand) that the reason was urgent, inasmuch as she fled to escape the meshes of the terrific net of the marital law brutally whirled to capture her by the man her husband.

CHAPTER XV

INTRODUCES THE HON.  PERCY DACIER

The Gods of this world’s contests, against whom our poor stripped individual is commonly in revolt, are, as we know, not miners, they are reapers; and if we appear no longer on the surface, they cease to bruise us:  they will allow an arena character to be cleansed and made presentable while enthusiastic friends preserve discretion.  It is of course less than magnanimity; they are not proposed to you for your worship; they are little Gods, temporary as that great wave, their parent human mass of the hour.  But they have one worshipful element in them, which is, the divine insistency upon there being two sides to a case—­to every case.  And the People so far directed by them may boast of healthfulness.  Let the individual shriek, the innocent, triumphant, have in honesty to admit the fact.  One side is vanquished, according to decree of Law, but the superior Council does not allow it to be extinguished.