ned 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.

The specially womanly exultation of Emma Dunstane in her friend's noble
attitude, seeing how their sex had been struck to the dust for a trifling
error, easily to be overlooked by a manful lover, and had asserted its
dignity in physical and moral splendour, in self-mastery and benignness,
was unshared by Diana. As soon as the business of the expedition was
over, her orders were issued for the sale of the lease of her house and
all it contained. 'I would sell Danvers too,' she said, 'but the creature
declines to be treated as merchandize. It seems I have a faithful
servant; very much like my life, not quite to my taste; the one thing out
of the wreck!--with my