Stricken, they had cried out, and ambition had fled away, leaving behind only the habit of living, and of work and duty.
As Hylda, in the Duchess of Snowdon's box, listened with a face which showed nothing of what she felt, and looking straight at the stage before her, the words of a poem she had learned but yesterday came to her mind, and wove themselves into the music thrilling from the voice in the stage prison: "And what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence For the fulness of the days?
Have we withered or agonised?
Why else was the pause prolonged but that singing might issue thence?
Why rushed the discords in, but that harmony should be prized ?" "And what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence ?" Was it then so?
The long weeks which had passed since that night at Hamley, when she had told Eglington the truth about so many things, had brought no peace, no understanding, no good news from anywhere.

The morning after she had spoken with heart laid bare.

Eglington had essayed to have a reconciliation; but he had come as the martyr, as one injured.

His egotism at such a time, joined to his attempt to make light of things, of treating what had happened as a mere "moment of exasperation," as "one of those episodes inseparable from the lives of the high-spirited," only made her heart sink and grow cold, almost as insensible as the flesh under a spray of ether.

He had been neither wise nor patient.