"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 Their great moment had passed, had left her withdrawn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 functions.

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