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
last after that poignant revelation to Eglington--she wept, as she had