ulent of a fatly prosperous people; who take
it, one may concede to them, for an inspired elimination of the higher
notes of life: the very highest. That saying of Tony's ripened with full
significance to Emma now. Not sensualism, but sham spiritualism, was the
meaning; and however fine the notes, they come skilfully evoked of the
under-brute in us. Reasoning it so, she thought it a saying for the
penetration of the most polished and deceptive of the later human masks.
She had besides, be it owned, a triumph in conjuring a sentence of her
friend's, like a sword's edge, to meet them; for she was boiling angrily
at the ironical destiny which had given to those Two a beclouding of her
beloved, whom she could have rebuked in turn for her insane caprice of
passion.

But when her beloved stood-up to greet Mrs. Percy Dacier, all idea save
tremulous admiration of the valiant woman, who had been wounded nigh
to death, passed from Emma's mind. Diana tempered her queenliness to
address the favoured lady with smiles and phrases of gentle warmth, of
goodness of nature; and it became a halo rather than a personal eclipse
that she cast.

Emma looked at Dacier. He wore the prescribed conventional air, subject
in half a minute to a rapid blinking of the eyelids. His wife could have
been inimically imagined fascinated and dwindling. A spot of colour came
to her cheeks. She likewise began to blink.

The happy couple bowed, proceeding; and Emma had Dacier's back for a
study. We score on that flat slate of man, unattractive as it is
to hostile observations, and unprotected, the device we choose. Her
harshest, was the positive thought that he had taken the woman best
suited to him. Doubtless, he was a man to prize the altar-candle
above the lamp of day. She fancied the back-view of him shrunken and
straitened: perhaps a mere hostile fancy: though it was conceivable that
he should desire as little of these meetings as possible. Eclipses are
not courted.

The specially womanly exultation of Emma Dunstane in her friend's
noble attitude, seeing how their sex had been struck to the dust for
a trifling error, easily to be overlooked by a manful lover, and had
asserted its dignity in physical and moral splendour, in self-mastery
and benignness, was unshared by Diana. As soon as the business of the
expedition was over, her orders were issued for the sale of the lease
of her house and all it contained. 'I would sell Danvers too,' she said,
'but