ritable
horror. From regions celestial to regions terrestrial she had been
hurried with rather dislocating suddenness. But her sorry journey did
not end there. For hardly were her feet planted on solid earth again,
than the demand came that she should descend still further--to regions
sub-terrestrial, regions frankly infernal. And this descent to hell,
though rapid to the point of astonishment, was by no means easy. Rather
was it violent and remorseless--a driving as by reiterated blows, a
rude merciless dragging onward and downward. Yet even so, for all the
anguish and shame--as of unseemly exposure--the perversion of her
intention and action, the scorn so ruthlessly poured upon her, it was
less of herself, the compelled, than of Richard, the compelling, that
she thought. For even while his anger thus drove and dragged her, he
himself was tortured in the flame far below,--so it seemed, and that
constituted the finest sting of her agony--beyond her power to reach or
help. She, after all, but stood on the edge of the crater, watching. He
fought, right down in the molten waves of it--fought with himself, too,
more fiercely even than he fought with her. So that now, as years ago
waiting outside the red drawing-room, hearing the stern, peremptory
tones of the surgeons, the moan of unspeakable physical pain, the
grating of a saw, picturing the dismemberment of the living body she so
loved, Katherine was tempted to run a little mad and beat her beautiful
head against the wall. But age, while taking no jot or tittle from the
capacity of suffering, still, in sane and healthy natures, brings a
certain steadiness to the brain and coolness to the blood. Therefore
Katherine sat very still and silent, her sweet eyes half closed, her
spirit bowed in unspoken prayer. Surely the all-loving God, who, but a
brief hour ago, had vouchsafed her the fair vision of the delight of
her youth, would ease his torment and spare her son?

And, all the while, outward nature remained reposeful and gracious in
aspect as ever. The churring of the night-jars, the occasional bark of
the fox in the Warren, the song of the answering nightingales, wandered
in at the open casements. And, along with these, came the sweetness of
the beds of wild thyme from the grass slopes, and the rich, languid
scent of the blossom of the little, round-headed, orange trees set, in
green tubs below the carven guardian griffins, on the flight of steps
leading up to the main ent