nd then-good-bye gentility!
I should have worked for my bread. I had thoughts of America. I fancy I
can write; and Americans, one hears, are gentle to women.'

'Ah, Tony! there's the looking back. And, of all women, you!'

'Or else, dear-well, perhaps once on foreign soil, in a different air, I
might--might have looked back, and seen my whole self, not shattered, as
I feel it now, and come home again compassionate to the poor persecuted
animal to defend her. Perhaps that was what I was running away for. I
fled on the instinct, often a good thing to trust.'

'I saw you at The Crossways.'

'I remembered I had the dread that you would, though I did not imagine
you would reach me so swiftly. My going there was an instinct, too. I
suppose we are all instinct when we have the world at our heels. Forgive
me if I generalize without any longer the right to be included in
the common human sum. "Pariah" and "taboo" are words we borrow from
barbarous tribes; they stick to me.'

'My Tony, you look as bright as ever, and you speak despairingly.'

'Call me enigma. I am that to myself, Emmy.'

'You are not quite yourself to your friend.'

'Since the blow I have been bewildered; I see nothing upright. It came
on me suddenly; stunned me. A bolt out of a clear sky, as they say. He
spared me a scene: There had been threats, and yet the sky was clear, or
seemed. When we have a man for arbiter, he is our sky.'

Emma pressed her Tony's unresponsive hand, feeling strangely that her
friend ebbed from her.

'Has he... to mislead him?' she said, colouring at the breach in the
question.

'Proofs? He has the proofs he supposes.'

'Not to justify suspicion?'

'He broke open my desk and took my letters.'

'Horrible! But the letters?' Emma shook with a nervous revulsion.

'You might read them.'

'Basest of men! That is the unpardonable cowardice!', exclaimed Emma.

'The world will read them, dear,' said Diana, and struck herself to ice.
She broke from the bitter frigidity in fury. 'They are letters--none
very long--sometimes two short sentences--he wrote at any spare moment.
On my honour, as a woman, I feel for him most. The letters--I would bear
any accusation rather than that exposure. Letters of a man of his age to
a young woman he rates too highly!

The world reads them. Do you hear it saying it could have excused her
for that fiddle-faddle with a younger--a young lover? And had I thought
of a lover!... I had no thought of lo