claim to a
small taste of it before she died. It seemed distinguishingly done, to
give a bite of happiness to the starving!

'I fancied when you were announced that you came for congratulations
upon your approaching marriage, Percy.'

'I shall expect to hear them from you to-morrow evening at the station,
dear Tony,' said he.

The time was again stated, the pledge repeated. He forbore entreaties
for privileges, and won her gratitude.

They named once more the place of meeting and the hour: more significant
to them than phrases of intensest love and passion. Pressing hands
sharply for pledge of good faith, they sundered.

She still had him in her eyes when he had gone. Her old world lay
shattered; her new world was up without a dawn, with but one figure, the
sun of it, to light the swinging strangeness.

Was ever man more marvellously transformed? or woman more wildly swept
from earth into the clouds? So she mused in the hum of her tempest of
heart and brain, forgetful of the years and the conditions preparing
both of them for this explosion.

She had much to do: the arrangements to dismiss her servants, write
to house-agents and her lawyer, and write fully to Emma, write the
enigmatic farewell to the Esquarts and Lady Pennon, Mary Paynham,
Arthur Rhodes, Whitmonby (stanch in friendship, but requiring friendly
touches), Henry Wilmers, and Redworth. He was reserved to the last, for
very enigmatical adieux: he would hear the whole story from Emma; must
be left to think as he liked.

The vague letters were excellently well composed: she was going abroad,
and knew not when she would return; bade her friends think the best they
could of her in the meantime. Whitmonby was favoured with an anecdote,
to be read as an apologue by the light of subsequent events. But the
letter to Emma tasked Diana. Intending to write fully, her pen committed
the briefest sentences: the tenderness she felt for Emma wakening her
heart to sing that she was loved, loved, and knew love at last; and
Emma's foreseen antagonism to the love and the step it involved rendered
her pleadings in exculpation a stammered confession of guiltiness,
ignominious, unworthy of the pride she felt in her lover. 'I am like
a cartridge rammed into a gun, to be discharged at a certain hour
tomorrow,' she wrote; and she sealed a letter so frigid that she could
not decide to post it. All day she imagined hearing a distant cannonade.
The light of the day following wa