lf to the task. He belonged to the class of his
countrymen who have a dungeon-vault for feelings that should not be
suffered to cry abroad, and into this oubliette he cast them, letting
them feed as they might, or perish. It was his heart down below, and in
no voluntary musings did he listen to it, to sustain the thing. Grimly
lord of himself, he stood emotionless before the world. Some worthy
fellows resemble him, and they are called deep-hearted. He was
dungeon-deep. The prisoner underneath might clamour and leap; none heard
him or knew of him; nor did he ever view the day. Diana's frank: 'Ah, Mr.
Redworth, how glad I am to see you!' was met by the calmest formalism of
the wish for her happiness. He became a guest at her London house, and
his report of the domesticity there, and notably of the lord of the
house, pleased Lady Dunstane more than her husband's. He saw the kind of
man accurately, as far as men are to be seen on the surface; and she
could say assentingly, without anxiety: 'Yes, yes,' to his remarks upon
Mr. Warwick, indicative of a man of capable head in worldly affairs,
commonplace beside his wife. The noble gentleman for Diana was yet
unborn, they tacitly agreed. Meantime one must not put a mortal husband
to the fiery ordeal of his wife's deserts, they agreed likewise. 'You may
be sure she is a constant friend,' Lady Dunstane said for his comfort;
and she reminded herself subsequently of a shade of disappointment at his
imperturbable rejoinder: 'I could calculate on it.' For though not at all
desiring to witness the sentimental fit, she wished to see that he held
an image of Diana:--surely a woman to kindle poets and heroes, the
princes of the race; and it was a curious perversity that the two men she
had moved were merely excellent, emotionless, ordinary men, with heads
for business. Elsewhere, out of England, Diana would have been a woman
for a place in song, exalted to the skies. Here she had the destiny to
inflame Mr. Redworth and Mr. Warwick, two railway Directors, bent upon
scoring the country to the likeness of a child's lines of hop-scotch in a
gravel-yard.

As with all invalids, the pleasure of living backward was haunted by the
tortures it evoked, and two years later she recalled this outcry against
the Fates. She would then have prayed for Diana to inflame none but such
men as those two. The original error was; of course, that rash and most
inexplicable marriage, a step never alluded to by the