‘You have heard from Mrs. Warwick?’ she said.

He replied, ‘I had the latest from Mr. Redworth.’

‘Mrs. Warwick has relinquished her post?’

’When she does, you may be sure that Lady Dunstane is, perfectly reestablished.’

‘She is an excellent nurse.’

‘The best, I believe.’

‘It is a good quality in sickness.’

‘Proof of good all through.’

’Her husband might have the advantage of it.  His state is really pathetic.  If she has feeling, and could only be made aware, she might perhaps be persuaded to pass from the friendly to the wifely duty.’

Mr. Dacier bent his head to listen, and he bowed.

He was fast in the toils; and though we have assurance that evil cannot triumph in perpetuity, the aspect of it throning provokes a kind of despair.  How strange if ultimately the lawyers once busy about the uncle were to take up the case of the nephew, and this time reverse the issue, by proving it!  For poor Mr. Warwick was emphatic on the question of his honour.  It excited him dangerously.  He was long-suffering, but with the slightest clue terrible.  The unknotting of the entanglement might thus happen—­and Constance Asper would welcome her hero still.

Meanwhile there was actually nothing to be done:  a deplorable absence of motive villainy; apparently an absence of the beneficent Power directing events to their proper termination.  Lady Wathin heard of her cousin’s having been removed to Cowes in May, for light Solent and Channel voyages on board Lord Esquart’s yacht.  She heard also of heavy failures and convulsions in the City of London, quite unconscious that the Fates, or agents of the Providence she invoked to precipitate the catastrophe, were then beginning cavernously their performance of the part of villain in Diana’s history.

Diana and Emma enjoyed happy quiet sailings under May breezes on the many-coloured South-western waters, heart in heart again; the physical weakness of the one, the moral weakness of the other, creating that mutual dependency which makes friendship a pulsating tie.  Diana’s confession had come of her letter to Emma.  When the latter was able to examine her correspondence, Diana brought her the heap for perusal, her own sealed scribble, throbbing with all the fatal might-have-been, under her eyes.  She could have concealed and destroyed it.  She sat beside her friend, awaiting her turn, hearing her say at the superscription:  ’Your writing, Tony?’ and she nodded.  She was asked:  ‘Shall I read it?’ She answered:  ‘Read.’  They were soon locked in an embrace.  Emma had no perception of coldness through those brief dry lines; her thought was of the matter.

‘The danger is over now?’ she said.

‘Yes, that danger is over now.’

‘You have weathered it?’

‘I love him.’