euvres; whose
voices were heard no more in chambers of legislation, lashing partisan
feeling to a height of cruelty or lulling a storm among rebellious
followers; whose intellects no longer devised vast schemes of finance,
or applied secrets of science to transform industry--these heard the
enthralling cry of a soul with the darkness of eternal loss gathering
upon it, and drew back within themselves; for they too had cried like
this one time or another in their lives. Stricken, they had cried out,
and ambition had fled away, leaving behind only the habit of living, and
of work and duty.

As Hylda, in the Duchess of Snowdon's box, listened with a face which
showed nothing of what she felt, and looking straight at the stage
before her, the words of a poem she had learned but yesterday came to
her mind, and wove themselves into the music thrilling from the voice in
the stage prison:

"And what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence
For the fulness of the days? Have we withered or agonised?
Why else was the pause prolonged but that singing might issue
thence?
Why rushed the discords in, but that harmony should be prized?"

"And what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence?" Was it then so?
The long weeks which had passed since that night at Hamley, when she had
told Eglington the truth about so many things, had brought no peace,
no understanding, no good news from anywhere. The morning after she
had spoken with heart laid bare. Eglington had essayed to have a
reconciliation; but he had come as the martyr, as one injured. His
egotism at such a time, joined to his attempt to make light of things,
of treating what had happened as a mere "moment of exasperation," as
"one of those episodes inseparable from the lives of the high-spirited,"
only made her heart sink and grow cold, almost as insensible as the
flesh under a spray of ether. He had been neither wise nor patient. She
had not slept after that bitter, terrible scene, and the morning had
found her like one battered by winter seas, every nerve desperately
alert to pain, yet tears swimming at her heart and ready to spring to
her eyes at a touch of the real thing, the true note--and she knew so
well what the true thing was! Their great moment had passed, had left
her withdrawn into herself, firmly, yet without heart, performing the
daily duties of life, gay before the world, the delightful hostess, the
necessary and graceful figure at so many f