 based scientifically when speculating and calculating, on the
material element - a talisman. Men and women crossing the high seas of life he
had found most readable under that illuminating inquiry, as to their means. An
inspector of sea-worthy ships proceeds in like manner. Whence would the money
come? He could not help the bent of his mind; but he could avoid subjecting her
to the talismanic touch. The girl at the Dublin Ball, the woman at the
fire-grate of The Crossways, both in one were his Diana. Now and then, hearing
an ugly whisper, his manful sympathy with the mere woman in her imprisoned
liberty, defended her desperately from charges not distinctly formulated within
him: - »She's not made of stone.« That was a height of self-abnegation to shake
the poor fellow to his roots; but, then, he had no hopes of his own; and he
stuck to it. Her choice of a man like Dacier, too, of whom Redworth judged
highly, showed nobility. She irradiated the man; but no baseness could be in
such an alliance. If allied, they were bound together for good. The tie -
supposing a villain world not wrong - was only not the sacred tie because of
impediments. The tie! - he deliberated, and said stoutly No. Men of Redworth's
nature go through sharp contests, though the duration of them is short, and the
tussle of his worship of this woman with the materialistic turn of his mind was
closed by the complete shutting up of the latter under lock and bar; so that a
man, very little of an idealist, was able to sustain her in the pure imagination
- where she did almost belong to him. She was his, in a sense, because she might
have been his - but for an incredible extreme of folly. The dark ring of the
eclipse cast by some amazing foolishness round the shining crescent perpetually
in secret claimed the whole sphere of her, by what might have been, while
admitting her lost to him in fact. To Thomas Redworth's mind the lack of perfect
sanity in his conduct at any period of manhood, was so entirely past belief that
he flew at the circumstances confirming the charge, and had wrestles with the
angel of reality, who did but set him dreaming backward, after flinging him.
    He heard at Lady Wathin's that Mrs. Warwick was in town for the winter. »Mr.
Dacier is also in town,« Lady Wathin said, with an acid indication of the
needless mention of it. »We
