, or some debt for
indulgence. There's a subject:--let some one write, Fables in
illustration of the irony of Fate: and I'll undertake to tack-on my
grandmother's maxims for a moral to teach of 'em. We prate of that irony
when we slink away from the lesson--the rod we conjure. And you to talk
of Fate! It's the seed we sow, individually or collectively. I'm bound-up
in the prosperity of the country, and if the ship is wrecked, it ruins my
fortune, but not me, unless I'm bound-up in myself. At least I hope
that's my case.'

He apologized for intruding Mr. Thomas Redworth.

His hearer looked at him, thinking he required a more finely pointed gift
of speech for the ironical tongue, but relishing the tonic directness of
his faculty of reason while she considered that the application of the
phrase might be brought home to him so as to render 'my Grandmother's
moral' a conclusion less comfortingly, if quite intelligibly, summary.
And then she thought of Tony's piteous instance; and thinking with her
heart, the tears insisted on that bitter irony of the heavens, which
bestowed the long-withheld and coveted boon when it was empty of value or
was but as a handful of spices to a shroud.

Perceiving the moisture in her look, Redworth understood that it was
foolish to talk rationally. But on her return to her beloved, the real
quality of the man had overcome her opposing state of sentiment, and she
spoke of him with an iteration and throb in the voice that set a singular
query whirring round Diana's ears. Her senses were too heavy for a
suspicion.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

CONVALESCENCE OF A HEALTHY MIND DISTRAUGHT

From an abandonment that had the last pleasure of life in a willingness
to yield it up, Diana rose with her friend's help in some state of
fortitude, resembling the effort of her feet to bear the weight of her
body. She plucked her courage out of the dust to which her heart had been
scattered, and tasked herself to walk as the world does. But she was
indisposed to compassionate herself in the manner of the burdened world.
She lashed the creature who could not raise a head like others, and made
the endurance of torture a support, such as the pride of being is to men.
She would not have seen any similarity to pride in it; would have deemed
it the reverse. It was in fact the painful gathering of the atoms
composing pride. For she had not only suffered; she had done wrongly: and
when that was acknowledged, by the light