s for
feature.'

'To my thinking, the case is, that if it is a widow who sees the
superhuman excellence in a man, she may be very well contented to cross
the bridge with him,' rejoined Emma....

'Suppose the bridge to break, and for her to fall into the water, he
rescuing her--then perhaps!'

'But it has been happening!'

'But piecemeal, in extension, so slowly. I go to him a derelict, bearing
a story of the sea; empty of ideas. I remember sailing out of harbour
passably well freighted for commerce.'

'When Tom Redworth has had command of the "derelict" a week, I should
like to see her!'

The mention of that positive captaincy drowned Diana in morning colours.
She was dominated, physically and morally, submissively too. What she
craved, in the absence of the public whiteness which could have caused
her to rejoice in herself as a noble gift, was the spring of enthusiasm.
Emma touched a quivering chord of pride with her hint at the good
augury, and foreshadowing of the larger Union, in the Irishwoman's
bestowal of her hand on the open-minded Englishman she had learned to
trust. The aureole glimmered transiently: she could neither think
highly of the woman about to be wedded, nor poetically of the man; nor,
therefore, rosily of the ceremony, nor other than vacuously of life.
And yet, as she avowed to Emma, she had gathered the three rarest good
things of life: a faithful friend, a faithful lover, a faithful servant:
the two latter exposing an unimagined quality of emotion. Danvers,
on the night of the great day for Redworth, had undressed her with
trembling fingers, and her mistress was led to the knowledge that the
maid had always been all eye; and on reflection to admit that it came of
a sympathy she did not share.

But when Celtic brains are reflective on their emotional vessel they
shoot direct as the arrow of logic. Diana's glance at the years behind
lighted every moving figure to a shrewd transparency, herself among
them. She was driven to the conclusion that the granting of any of her
heart's wild wishes in those days would have lowered her--or frozen.
Dacier was a coldly luminous image; still a tolling name; no longer
conceivably her mate. Recollection rocked, not she. The politician and
citizen was admired: she read the man;--more to her own discredit than
to his, but she read him, and if that is done by the one of two lovers
who was true to love, it is the God of the passion pronouncing a final
release