For the life of him Endymion could never see where the joke came in; but the fellow had illustrated it with such a wealth of humorous instances, and had kept his ignorant audience for twenty minutes in such fits of laughter, that he never afterwards approached the antithesis but he skirted it with a red face.
And Dorothea?
The scourge might cut into her heart; it could not reach the image of Raoul she shielded there.

She knew her lover too well, and that he was incapable of this baseness.

But the injurious charge, diverted from him, fell upon her own defences, and, breaking them, let in the cruel light at length on her passion, her folly.

This was how the world would see it.

.