"Then I will try my luck," said the other.
He went out, and John knew that he had gone to try it there and then; and sat motionless, with his hand across his mouth and his unfinished letter before him, until the servant came to close the shutters.
"We live together years and years, And leave unsounded still Each other's springs of hopes and fears, Each other's depths of will." LORD HOUGHTON.
But still more bewildering is the way in which we live years and years with ourselves in an entire ignorance of the powers that lie dormant beneath the surface of character. The day comes when vital forces of which we know nothing arise within us, and break like glass the even tenor of our lives. The quiet hours, the regulated thoughts, the peaceful aspiration after things but little set above us, where are they? The angel with the sword drives us out of our Eden to shiver in the wilderness of an entirely changed existence, unrecognizable by ourselves, though perhaps lived in the same external groove, the same divisions of time, among the same faces as before.
Day succeeded day in Di's life, each day adding one more stone to the prison in which it seemed as if an inexorable hand were walling her up.
"I will not give in. I will turn my mind to other things," she said to herself. And--there were no other things. All lesser lights were blown out. The heart, when it is swept into the grasp of a great love, is ruthlessly torn from the hundred minute ties and interests that heretofore held it to life. The little fibres and tendrils of affections which have gradually grown round certain objects are snapped off from the roots. They cease to exist. The pang of love is that there is no escape from it. It has the same tension as sleeplessness.
Di struggled and was not defeated; but some victories are as sad as defeats. During the struggle she lost something--what was it--that had been to many her greatest charm? Women were unanimous in deploring how she had "gone off." There was a thinness in her cheek, and a blue line under her deep eyes. Her beauty remained, but it was not the same beauty. Mrs. Courtenay noticed with a pang that she was growing like her mother.
Easter came, and with it the wedding of Miss Crupps and the Honourable Augustus Lumley, youngest son of Lord Mortgage. Miss Crupps' young heart had long inclined towards Mr. Lumley; but on the occasion of seeing him blacked as a Christy Minstrel, she had finally succumbed into a state of giggling admiration, which plainly showed the state of her affections. So he cut the word "yes" out of a newspaper, and told her that was what she was to say to him, and amid a series of delighted cackles they were engaged. Di went to the wedding, looking so pale that it was whispered that Mr. Lumley and his tambourine had won her heart as well as that of his adoring bride.