ousandfold more intense. They enabled her to do
her bowing and smiling, to hope eagerly, to work unceasingly, to be gay
and happy in the excitement of fighting and the prospect of victory. She
could put aside the memory of Tom Sinnett; they had not been to blame;
let that affair be set off against Smiley's hypothetical extension of
the Recreation Ground. She felt that she could face people, above all
that she could face the Mildmays when the time came for her to meet them
at the declaration of the poll. And as regarded her husband she could do
more than praise and more than admire; she could feel tenderness and a
touch of remorse as she saw him battling against worse than the enemy,
against a deadly weariness and weakness to which he would not yield.
From to-morrow she determined to lay to heart the doctor's counsel, to
try whether he could not be persuaded to stand a little coddling,
whether he might not be brought to, if only she could persuade herself
to show him more love. When she looked at the Mildmays she understood
what had perhaps been in the doctor's mind; dear Lady Mildmay (she was a
woman who immediately claimed that epithet with its expression of
mingled affection and ridicule) no doubt overdid a little her pleasant
part. She made Sir Winterton a trifle absurd. But then with what
chivalry he faced and covered the touch of absurdity, or avoided it
without offending the love that caused it! Very glad she was that, when
Lady Mildmay asked to be introduced, she could clasp hands with the
consciousness that her side had played fair, and by a delicate distant
reference could honestly assure the enemy's wife that both she and her
husband had looked with disfavour on that unpleasant episode.

She had known she would like Sir Winterton and was not disappointed; she
saw that he was very favourably impressed by her, largely, no doubt,
because she was handsome, even more because their ways of looking at
things would be very much the same; they had the same pride and the same
sensitiveness; in humour he was not her match, or he would not have
ridden his high horse. She felt that he complimented her in begging her
to make him known to Quisante; and this office also she was able to
perform with pleasure, because they had played fair. Hope was high in
her that night, not merely for this contest, not merely now for her
husband's career, but for her life and his, for her and him themselves.
If her old fears had been proved wr