deep. The prisoner underneath might clamour and leap; none heard him
or knew of him; nor did he ever view the day. Diana's frank: 'Ah, Mr.
Redworth, how glad I am to see you!' was met by the calmest formalism
of the wish for her happiness. He became a guest at her London house,
and his report of the domesticity there, and notably of the lord of the
house, pleased Lady Dunstane more than her husband's. He saw the kind
of man accurately, as far as men are to be seen on the surface; and she
could say assentingly, without anxiety: 'Yes, yes,' to his remarks upon
Mr. Warwick, indicative of a man of capable head in worldly affairs,
commonplace beside his wife. The noble gentleman for Diana was yet
unborn, they tacitly agreed. Meantime one must not put a mortal husband
to the fiery ordeal of his wife's deserts, they agreed likewise.
'You may be sure she is a constant friend,' Lady Dunstane said for
his comfort; and she reminded herself subsequently of a shade of
disappointment at his imperturbable rejoinder: 'I could calculate on it.'
For though not at all desiring to witness the sentimental fit, she wished
to see that he held an image of Diana:--surely a woman to kindle poets
and heroes, the princes of the race; and it was a curious perversity that
the two men she had moved were merely excellent, emotionless, ordinary
men, with heads for business. Elsewhere, out of England, Diana would
have been a woman for a place in song, exalted to the skies. Here she
had the destiny to inflame Mr. Redworth and Mr. Warwick, two railway
Directors, bent upon scoring the country to the likeness of a child's
lines of hop-scotch in a gravel-yard.

As with all invalids, the pleasure of living backward was haunted by the
tortures it evoked, and two years later she recalled this outcry against
the Fates. She would then have prayed for Diana to inflame none but such
men as those two. The original error was; of course, that rash and most
inexplicable marriage, a step never alluded to by the driven victim of