.

His wrath was partially quieted by the new speculations offered up to it.
He could not conjure a suspicion of treachery in Diana Warwick; and a
treachery so foully cynical! She had gone with a gentleman. He guessed on
all sides; he struck at walls, as in complete obscurity.

The mystery of her conduct troubling his wits for the many hours was
explained by Danvers. With a sympathy that she was at pains to show, she
informed him that her mistress was not at all unwell, and related of how
Mr. Redworth had arrived just when her mistress was on the point of
starting for Paris and the Continent; because poor Lady Dunstane was this
very day to undergo an operation under the surgeons at Copsley, and she
did not wish her mistress to be present, but Mr. Redworth thought her
mistress ought to be there, and he had gone down thinking she was there,
and then came back in hot haste to fetch her, and was just in time, as it
happened, by two or three minutes.

Dacier rewarded the sympathetic woman for her intelligence, which
appeared to him to have shot so far as to require a bribe. Gratitude to
the person soothing his unwontedly ruffled temper was the cause of the
indiscretion in the amount he gave.

It appeared to him that he ought to proceed to Copsley for tidings of
Lady Dunstane. Thither he sped by the handy railway and a timely train.
He reached the parkgates at three in the afternoon, telling his flyman to
wait. As he advanced by short cuts over the grass, he studied the look of
the rows of windows. She was within, and strangely to his clouded senses
she was no longer Tony, no longer the deceptive woman he could in justice
abuse. He and she, so close to union, were divided. A hand resembling the
palpable interposition of Fate had swept them asunder. Having the poorest
right--not any--to reproach her, he was disarmed, he felt himself a
miserable intruder; he summoned his passion to excuse him, and gained
some unsatisfied repose of mind by contemplating its devoted sincerity;
which roused an effort to feel for the sufferer--Diana Warwick's friend.
With the pair of surgeons named, the most eminent of their day, in
attendance, the case must be serious. To vindicate the breaker of her
pledge, his present plight likewise assured him of that, and nearing the
house he adopted instinctively the funeral step and mood, just sensible
of a novel smallness. For the fortifying testimony of his passion had to
be put aside, he was obliged t