If Dorothy knew more of her own feelings than she who watched her, she was far less confident that she understood them.  Indeed she found them strangely complicated, and as difficult to control as to understand, while she stood gazing on the youth who through her found himself helpless and wounded in the hands of his enemies.  He was all in the wrong, no doubt—­a rebel against his king, and an apostate from the church of his country; but he was the same Richard with whom she had played all her childhood, whom her mother had loved, and between whom and herself had never fallen shadow before that cast by the sudden outblaze of the star of childish preference into the sun of youthful love.  And was it not when the very mother of shadows, the blackness of darkness itself, swept between them and separated them for ever, that first she knew how much she had loved him?  What if not with the love that could listen entranced to its own echo!—­love of child or love of maiden, Dorothy never asked herself which it had been, or which it was now.  She was not given to self-dissection.  The cruel fingers of analysis had never pulled her flower to pieces, had never rubbed the bloom from the sun-dyed glow of her feelings.  But now she could not help the vaporous rise of a question:  all was over, for Richard had taken the path of presumption, rebellion, and violence—­how then came it that her heart beat with such a strange delight at every answer he made to the expostulations or enticements of the marquis?  How was it that his approval of the intruder, not the less evident that it was unspoken, made her heart swell with pride and satisfaction, causing her to forget the rude rebellion housed within the form whose youth alone prevented it from looking grand in her eyes?

For the moment her heart had the better of—­her conscience, shall I say?  Yes, of that part of her conscience, I will allow, which had grown weak by the wandering of its roots into the poor soil of opinion.  In the delight which the manliness of the young fanatic awoke in her, she even forgot the dull pain which had been gnawing at her heart ever since first she saw the blood streaming down his face as he passed her in the gateway.  But when at length he fell fainting in the arms of his captors, and the fear that she had slain him writhed sickening through her heart, it was with a grim struggle indeed that she kept silent and conscious.  The voice of the marquis, committing him to the care of mistress Watson instead of the rough ministrations of the guard, came with the power of a welcome restorative, and she hastened after his bearers to satisfy herself that the housekeeper was made understand that he was carried to her at the marquis’s behest.  She then retired to her own chamber, passing in, the corridor Amanda, whose room was in the, same quarter, with a salute careless from weariness and preoccupation.

The moment her head was on her pillow the great fight began—­on that only battle-field of which all others are but outer types and pictures, upon which the thoughts of the same spirit are the combatants, accusing and excusing one another.