criticise as one of the finest tenderest sacrifices a woman had ever made
for love.




CHAPTER XII


She was occasionally worried, however this might be, by the impression
that these sacrifices, great as they were, were nothing to those that his
own passion had imposed; if indeed it was not rather the passion of his
confederate, which had caught him up and was whirling him round like a
great steam-wheel. He was at any rate in the strong grip of a dizzy
splendid fate; the wild wind of his life blew him straight before it.
Didn't she catch in his face at times, even through his smile and his
happy habit, the gleam of that pale glare with which a bewildered victim
appeals, as he passes, to some pair of pitying eyes? He perhaps didn't
even himself know how scared he was; but _she_ knew. They were in
danger, they were in danger, Captain Everard and Lady Bradeen: it beat
every novel in the shop. She thought of Mr. Mudge and his safe
sentiment; she thought of herself and blushed even more for her tepid
response to it. It was a comfort to her at such moments to feel that in
another relation--a relation supplying that affinity with her nature that
Mr. Mudge, deluded creature, would never supply--she should have been no
more tepid than her ladyship. Her deepest soundings were on two or three
occasions of finding herself almost sure that, if she dared, her
ladyship's lover would have gathered relief from "speaking" to her. She
literally fancied once or twice that, projected as he was toward his
doom, her own eyes struck him, while the air roared in his ears, as the