she knew that, he would probably
treat her decently for at least a fortnight.

"I don't know a creature," she praised herself, "who would have stayed
on with Jack, and nothing but Jimmy has helped me to stick it out. If
he really loved me would he have let me go on as I have gone on? I
don't know. Unless he loved me could he have helped me at all? I
think not."

Round the figure of her friend there began to group, as if for some
special purpose, the kindnesses and charities she had seen him display.
One by one she added up his gifts and benefits until the poor and
outcast and forgotten and despised claimed all of them to be his
friends; they gathered round him and in place of the categoric
histories of self-love and indulgence, of passion that had in more or
less degree characterized the men of her set, these things came till
the dawn of them and the light of them made his figure shine. How, she
thought, could he ever have been what he so wonderfully is, if he had
lived for himself or been anything but the best? Upstairs, in her
room, a few hours before, the mark of silver on her hair had been a
whip to urge on her rebellion; to tell her to seize and make the most
of the fleeting time, to warn her of the age which when her beauty and
her youth were gone, was all that could remain for them both. But now
there began to blow across her soul a freshness. She had indeed been
drawing long breaths in her husband's absence, but free as they were
they left her stifled and panting, as if to get the oxygen she had been
obliged to climb too far. Now, on the contrary, she was lifted as by
wings, and whilst they fluttered about her she breathed evenly yet
fully, and the air on the heights was something better than wine.

There is an unspoiled enjoyment in the thing which has never given us
pain. It may be a sensual and ecstatic prerogative of passion to make
the object suffer, but there is a different sense of happiness in that
which never does harm or hurt or wrong to the thing it loves. So she
could think of Bulstrode, without pain, without regret, without
reproach. And if the ardor and passion in her became suffused and
slowly paled, there was a starry brightness, a beauty in her face and
in her eyes such as Bulstrode, when he came in to find her waiting, had
never seen before.

With every mile of the short run from The Dials back to the castle,
Mrs. Falconer's friend had been preparing himself for his meeting w