of her sufferings the
wrong-doing appeared gigantic, chorussing eulogies of the man she had
thought her lover: and who was her lover once, before the crime against
him. In the opening of her bosom to Emma, he was painted a noble figure;
one of those that Romance delights to harass for the sake of ultimately
the more exquisitely rewarding. He hated treachery: she had been guilty
of doing what he most hated. She glorified him for the incapacity to
forgive; it was to her mind godlike. And her excuses of herself?

At the first confession, she said she had none, and sullenly maintained
that there was none to exonerate. Little by little her story was
related--her version of the story: for not even as woman to woman, friend
to great-hearted friend, pure soul to soul, could Diana tell of the state
of shivering abjection in which Dacier had left her on the fatal night;
of the many causes conducing to it, and of the chief. That was an
unutterable secret, bound by all the laws of feminine civilization not to
be betrayed. Her excessive self-abasement and exaltation of him who had
struck her down, rendered it difficult to be understood; and not till
Emma had revolved it and let it ripen in the mind some days could she
perceive with any clearness her Tony's motives, or mania. The very word
Money thickened the riddle: for Tony knew that her friend's purse was her
own to dip in at her pleasure; yet she, to escape so small an obligation,
had committed the enormity for which she held the man blameless in
spurning her.

'You see what I am, Emmy,' Diana said.

'What I do not see, is that he had grounds for striking so cruelly.'

'I proved myself unworthy of him.'

But does a man pretending to love a woman cut at one blow, for such a
cause, the ties uniting her to him? Unworthiness of that kind, is not
commonly the capital offence in love. Tony's deep prostration and her
resplendent picture of her judge and executioner, kept Emma questioning
within herself. Gradually she became enlightened enough to distinguish in
the man a known, if not common, type of the externally soft and polished,
internally hard and relentless, who are equal to the trials of love only
as long as favouring circumstances and seemings nurse the fair object of
their courtship.

Her thoughts recurred to the madness driving Tony to betray the secret;
and the ascent unhelped to get a survey of it and her and the conditions,
was mountainous. She toiled up but to enter