‘Except by me,’ said Emma, embracing her.  ’Tony would have left her friend for her last voyage in mourning.  And my dearest will live to know happiness.’

‘I have no more belief in it, Emmy.’

‘The mistake of the world is to think happiness possible to the senses.’

’Yes; we distil that fine essence through the senses; and the act is called the pain of life.  It is the death of them.  So much I understand of what our existence must be.  But I may grieve for having done so little.’

’That is the sound grief, with hope at the core—­not in love with itself and wretchedly mortal, as we find self is under every shape it takes; especially the chief one.’

‘Name it.’

‘It is best named Amor.’

There was a writhing in the frame of the hearer, for she did want Love to be respected; not shadowed by her misfortune.  Her still-flushed senses protested on behalf of the eternalness of the passion, and she was obliged to think Emma’s cold condemnatory intellect came of the no knowledge of it.

A letter from Mr. Tonans, containing an enclosure, was a sharp trial of Diana’s endurance of the irony of Fate.  She had spoken of the irony in allusion to her freedom.  Now that, according to a communication from her lawyers, she was independent of the task of writing, the letter which paid the price of her misery bruised her heavily.

‘Read it and tear it all to strips,’ she said in an abhorrence to Emma, who rejoined:  ‘Shall I go at once and see him?’

’Can it serve any end?  But throw it into the fire.  Oh! no simulation of virtue.  There was not, I think, a stipulated return for what I did.  But I perceive clearly—­I can read only by events—­that there was an understanding.  You behold it.  I went to him to sell it.  He thanks me, says I served the good cause well.  I have not that consolation.  If I had thought of the cause—­of anything high, it would have arrested me.  On the fire with it!’

The letter and square slip were consumed.  Diana watched the blackening papers.

So they cease their sinning, Emmy; and as long as I am in torment, I may hope for grace.  We talked of the irony.  It means, the pain of fire.’

‘I spoke of the irony to Redworth,’ said Emma; ‘incidentally, of course.’

‘And he fumed?’

’He is really not altogether the Mr. Cuthbert Dering of your caricature.  He is never less than acceptably rational.  I won’t repeat his truisms; but he said, or I deduced from what he said, that a grandmother’s maxims would expound the enigma.’

‘Probably the simple is the deep, in relation to the mysteries of life,’ said Diana, whose wits had been pricked to a momentary activity by the letter.  ’He behaves wisely; so perhaps we are bound to take his words for wisdom.  Much nonsense is talked and written, and he is one of the world’s reserves, who need no more than enrolling, to make a sturdy phalanx of common sense.  It’s a pity they are not enlisted and drilled to express themselves.’  She relapsed.  ’But neither he nor any of them could understand my case.’