 only suffered; she had done wrongly: and when
that was acknowledged, by the light of her sufferings the wrong-doing appeared
gigantic, chorussing eulogies of the man she had thought her lover: and who was
her lover once, before the crime against him. In the opening of her bosom to
Emma, he was painted a noble figure; one of those that Romance delights to
harass for the sake of ultimately the more exquisitely rewarding. He hated
treachery: she had been guilty of doing what he most hated. She glorified him
for the incapacity to forgive; it was to her mind godlike. And her excuses of
herself?
    At the first confession, she said she had none, and sullenly maintained that
there was none to exonerate. Little by little her story was related - her
version of the story: for not even as woman to woman, friend to great-hearted
friend, pure soul to soul, could Diana tell of the state of shivering abjection
in which Dacier had left her on the fatal night; of the many causes conducing to
it, and of the chief. That was an unutterable secret, bound by all the laws of
feminine civilization not to be betrayed. Her excessive self-abasement and
exaltation of him who had struck her down, rendered it difficult to be
understood; and not till Emma had revolved it and let it ripen in the mind some
days could she perceive with any clearness her Tony's motives, or mania. The
very word Money thickened the riddle: for Tony knew that her friend's purse was
her own to dip in at her pleasure; yet she, to escape so small an obligation,
had committed the enormity for which she held the man blameless in spurning her.
    »You see what I am, Emmy,« Diana said.
    »What I do not see, is that he had grounds for striking so cruelly.«
    »I proved myself unworthy of him.«
    But does a man pretending to love a woman cut at one blow, for such a cause,
the ties uniting her to him? Unworthiness of that kind, is not commonly the
capital offence in love. - Tony's deep prostration and her resplendent picture
of her judge and executioner, kept Emma questioning within herself. Gradually
she became enlightened enough to distinguish in the man a known, if not common,
type of the externally soft and polished, internally hard and relentless, who
are equal to the trials of love only as long as favouring circumstances and
seemings nurse the fair object of their courtship.
    Her thoughts recurred to the madness driving Tony to betray
