 This ironic fury, coming of the
contrast of the outer and the inner, would have been indulged to the extent of
permanent injury to her disposition had not her beloved Emma, immediately after
the tension of the struggle ceased, required her tenderest aid. Lady Dunstane
chanted victory, and at night collapsed. By the advice of her physician she was
removed to Copsley, where Diana's labour of anxious nursing restored her through
love to a saner spirit. The hopefulness of life must bloom again in the heart
whose prayers are offered for a life dearer than its own to be preserved. A
little return of confidence in Sir Lukin also refreshed her when she saw that
the poor creature did honestly, in his shaggy rough male fashion, reverence and
cling to the flower of souls he named as his wife. His piteous groans of
self-accusation during the crisis haunted her, and made the conduct and nature
of men a bewilderment to her still young understanding. Save for the knot of her
sensations (hardly a mental memory, but a sullen knot) which she did not
disentangle to charge him with his complicity in the blind rashness of her
marriage, she might have felt sisterly, as warmly as she compassionated him.
    It was midwinter when Dame Gossip, who keeps the exotic world alive with her
fanning whispers, related that the lovely Mrs. Warwick had left England on board
the schooner-yacht Clarissa, with Lord and Lady Esquart, for a voyage in the
Mediterranean: and (behind her hand) that the reason was urgent, inasmuch as she
fled to escape the meshes of the terrific net of the marital law brutally
whirled to capture her by the man her husband.
 

                                   Chapter XV

                        Introduces the Hon. Percy Dacier

The Gods of this world's contests, against whom our poor stripped individual is
commonly in revolt, are, as we know, not miners, they are reapers; and if we
appear no longer on the surface, they cease to bruise us: they will allow an
arena character to be cleansed and made presentable while enthusiastic friends
preserve discretion. It is of course less than magnanimity; they are not
proposed to you for your worship; they are little Gods, temporary as that great
wave, their parent human mass of the hour. But they have one worshipful element
in them, which is, the divine insistancy upon there being two sides to a case -
to every case. And the People so far directed by them may boast of
healthfulness. Let the individual shriek, the innocent, triumphant, have in
honesty to admit the fact. One side is vanquished, according to decree
