an was comparatively fresh, but
irritable to the last nerve, each jarring nerve twanging like
harpstrings, sending electric thrills of vexation and rage over his
whole body at the cross of every straw.

Diana, who had been up and busy for hours, was sitting at her desk; her
brow, whatever cares lurked behind it, unruffled and white; a seemly,
reasonable, refined woman, aggrieved every day she lived, but scorning
to betray a knowledge of the grievance.

"Don't go to Newton, above all by yourself, Gervase," the wife was
entreating, gravely and earnestly. "I am afraid my father may take the
opportunity of trying to get money from you. He has entered horses for
the Thorpe stakes: he will seek to make you enter them, and you told
me yourself May and Highflyer were not fit to run this year. Or he
will seek to lead you into some other transaction in horse-flesh, or
have you into the house to play billiards and remain to dinner and
cards all night, and there is always high play at Newton. My father is
a needy man, and needy men are tempted to be unscrupulous; at least
his code implies few scruples, where the letter of the laws of honour
is complied with."

"It comes ill off your hand to say so," observed Gervase harshly.
Undoubtedly he spoke no more than the truth, and such a life as Gervase
Norgate's was not a school for magnanimity.

Die winced a little; and she was a woman whose fair cheek so rarely
blushed, that her blushing was like another woman's crying. Die never
cried; Gervase Norgate had never wrung a tear from her, or seen her
shed a tear.

"Well, it was hard for me to say it," she admitted, with an accent of
reproach in her equable tones; "but there the wrong and the shame are,
and I owe it to myself and to you to warn you."

"I wonder how much I owe your being here to Newton-le-Moor being
little better than a not very reputable gambling-house," exclaimed
Gervase rudely.

She looked at him with her wide-open eyes, as if she had been struck,
but did not care to own the blow.

"It was not to much profit where you were concerned," he continued, in
an infatuation of brutality; "it did not get you so much as a
pocket-handkerchief, or a flower-garden like that down there, or,"
glancing round him, "trumpery hangings and mirrors, and a new gown or
two, or any other of the miserable trash for which women sell
themselves."

She neither spoke nor stirred.

He had worked himself into a blindness of rage, in which