he seemed the effigy of a tombstone one, fixed upright, and civilly proud of his effigy bride.  So far, Emma considered them fitted.  She perceived his quick eye on her corner of the room; necessarily, for a man of his breeding, without a change of expression.  An emblem pertaining to her creed was on the heroine’s neck; also dependant at her waist.  She was white from head to foot; a symbol of purity.  Her frail smile appeared deeply studied in purity.  Judging from her look and her reputation, Emma divined that the man was justly mated with a devious filmy sentimentalist, likely to ‘fiddle harmonics on the sensual strings’ for him at a mad rate in the years to come.  Such fiddling is indeed the peculiar diversion of the opulent of a fatly prosperous people; who take it, one may concede to them, for an inspired elimination of the higher notes of life:  the very highest.  That saying of Tony’s ripened with full significance to Emma now.  Not sensualism, but sham spiritualism, was the meaning; and however fine the notes, they come skilfully evoked of the under-brute in us.  Reasoning it so, she thought it a saying for the penetration of the most polished and deceptive of the later human masks.  She had besides, be it owned, a triumph in conjuring a sentence of her friend’s, like a sword’s edge, to meet them; for she was boiling angrily at the ironical destiny which had given to those Two a beclouding of her beloved, whom she could have rebuked in turn for her insane caprice of passion.

But when her beloved stood-up to greet Mrs. Percy Dacier, all idea save tremulous admiration of the valiant woman, who had been wounded nigh to death, passed from Emma’s mind.  Diana tempered her queenliness to address the favoured lady with smiles and phrases of gentle warmth, of goodness of nature; and it became a halo rather than a personal eclipse that she cast.

Emma looked at Dacier.  He wore the prescribed conventional air, subject in half a minute to a rapid blinking of the eyelids.  His wife could have been inimically imagined fascinated and dwindling.  A spot of colour came to her cheeks.  She likewise began to blink.

The happy couple bowed, proceeding; and Emma had Dacier’s back for a study.  We score on that flat slate of man, unattractive as it is to hostile observations, and unprotected, the device we choose.  Her harshest, was the positive thought that he had taken the woman best suited to him.  Doubtless, he was a man to prize the altar-candle above the lamp of day.  She fancied the back-view of him shrunken and straitened:  perhaps a mere hostile fancy:  though it was conceivable that he should desire as little of these meetings as possible.  Eclipses are not courted.