e reverse. It was in fact the painful gathering of
the atoms composing pride. For she had not only suffered; she had done
wrongly: and when that was acknowledged, by the light of her sufferings
the wrong-doing appeared gigantic, chorussing eulogies of the man she
had thought her lover: and who was her lover once, before the crime
against him. In the opening of her bosom to Emma, he was painted a noble
figure; one of those that Romance delights to harass for the sake of
ultimately the more exquisitely rewarding. He hated treachery: she
had been guilty of doing what he most hated. She glorified him for the
incapacity to forgive; it was to her mind godlike. And her excuses of
herself?

At the first confession, she said she had none, and sullenly maintained
that there was none to exonerate. Little by little her story was
related--her version of the story: for not even as woman to woman,
friend to great-hearted friend, pure soul to soul, could Diana tell of
the state of shivering abjection in which Dacier had left her on the
fatal night; of the many causes conducing to it, and of the chief.
That was an unutterable secret, bound by all the laws of feminine
civilization not to be betrayed. Her excessive self-abasement and
exaltation of him who had struck her down, rendered it difficult to be
understood; and not till Emma had revolved it and let it ripen in the
mind some days could she perceive with any clearness her Tony's motives,
or mania. The very word Money thickened the riddle: for Tony knew that
her friend's purse was her own to dip in at her pleasure; yet she, to
escape so small an obligation, had committed the enormity for which she
held the man blameless in spurning her.

'You see what I am, Emmy,' Diana said.

'What I do not see, is that he had grounds for striking so cruelly.'

'I proved myself unworthy of him.'

But does a man pretending to love a woman cut at one blow, for such a
cause, the ties uniting her to him? Unworthiness of that kind, is not
commonly the capital offence in love. Tony's deep prostration and her
resplendent picture of her judge and executioner, kept Emma questioning
within herself. Gradually she became enlightened enough to distinguish
in the man a known, if not common, type of the externally soft and
polished, internally hard and relentless, who are equal to the trials of
love only as long as favouring circumstances and seemings nurse the fair
object of their courtship.

Her thoughts