'

'He dared not speak.'

'Why did he not dare?'

'Would it have checked you?'

'I was a shot out of a gun, and I am glad he did not stand in my way.
What power charged the gun, is another question. Dada used to say, that
it is the devil's masterstroke to get us to accuse him. "So fare ye
well, old Nickie Ben." My dear, I am a black sheep; a creature with
a spotted reputation; I must wash and wash; and not with water--with
sulphur-flames.' She sighed. 'I am down there where they burn. You
should have let me lie and die. You were not kind. I was going quietly.'

'My love!' cried Emma, overborne by a despair that she traced to the
woman's concealment of her bleeding heart, 'you live for me. Do set your
mind on that. Think of what you are bearing, as your debt to Emma. Will
you?'

Tony bowed her head mechanically.

'But I am in love with King Death, and must confess it,' she said. 'That
hideous eating you forced on me, snatched me from him. And I feel that
if I had gone, I should have been mercifully forgiven by everybody.'

'Except by me,' said Emma, embracing her. 'Tony would have left her
friend for her last voyage in mourning. And my dearest will live to know
happiness.'

'I have no more belief in it, Emmy.'

'The mistake of the world is to think happiness possible to the senses.'

'Yes; we distil that fine essence through the senses; and the act is
called the pain of life. It is the death of them. So much I understand
of what our existence must be. But I may grieve for having done so
little.'

'That is the sound grief, with hope at the core--not in love with itself
and wretchedly mortal, as we find self is under every shape it takes;
especially the chief one.'

'Name it.'

'It is best named Amor.'

There was a writhing in the frame of the hearer, for she did want Love
to be respected; not shadowed by her misfortune. Her still-flushed
senses protested on behalf of the eternalness of the passion, and she
was obliged to think Emma's cold condemnatory intellect came of the no
knowledge of it.

A letter from Mr. Tonans, containing an enclosure, was a sharp trial of
Diana's endurance of the irony of Fate. She had spoken of the irony in
allusion to her freedom. Now that, according to a communication from her
lawyers, she was independent of the task of writing, the letter which
paid the price of her misery bruised her heavily.

'Read it and tear it all to strips,' she said in an abhorrence to Emma,
who