unctions.

Even as Soolsby had done, who went no further than to tell Eglington his
dark tale, and told no one else, withholding it from "Our Man"; as Sybil
Lady Eglington had shrunk when she had been faced by her obvious duty,
so Hylda hesitated, but from better reason than either. To do right in
the matter was to strike her husband--it must be a blow now, since her
voice had failed. To do right was to put in the ancient home and house
of Eglington one whom he--with anger and without any apparent desire
to have her altogether for himself, all the riches of her life and
love--had dared to say commanded her sympathy and interest, not because
he was a man dispossessed of his rights, but because he was a man
possessed of that to which he had no right. The insult had stung her,
had driven her back into a reserve, out of which she seemed unable to
emerge. How could she compel Eglington to do right in this thing--do
right by his own father's son?

Meanwhile, that father's son was once more imperilling his life, once
more putting England's prestige in the balance in the Soudan, from which
he had already been delivered twice as though by miracles. Since he had
gone, months before, there had been little news; but there had been
much public anxiety; and she knew only too well that there had been
'pourparlers' with foreign ministers, from which no action came
safe-guarding David.

Many a human being has realised the apathy, the partial paralysis of the
will, succeeding a great struggle, which has exhausted the vital forces.
Many a general who has fought a desperate and victorious fight after
a long campaign, and amid all the anxieties and miseries of war, has
failed to follow up his advantage, from a sudden lesion of the power for
action in him. He has stepped from the iron routine of daily effort into
a sudden freedom, and his faculties have failed him, the iron of his
will has vanished. So it was with Hylda. She waited for she knew not
what. Was it some dim hope that Eglington might see the right as she
saw it? That he might realise how unreal was this life they were living,
outwardly peaceful and understanding, deluding the world, but inwardly
a place of tears. How she dreaded the night and its recurrent tears, and
the hours when she could not sleep, and waited for the joyless morning,
as one lost on the moor, blanched with cold, waits for the sun-rise!
Night after night at a certain hour--the hour when she went to bed at
la