ad
opened the door to him. Her mistress's maid Mrs. Danvers had gone to
the Play--with William. She thought that Mrs. Danvers might know who the
gentleman was. The girl's eyelids blinked, and she turned aside. Dacier
consoled her with a piece of gold, saying he would come and see Mrs.
Danvers in the morning.

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 attendanc