To Leeward

by F. Marion Crawford

"He will be out of the house before we are up," she said in a tone of certainty. "Go to bed, dear boy, and never let him trouble your peace again."

"But I will trouble his peace," answered Marcantonio, bending his smooth brows.

"We will see about that afterwards," said Diana. "If you think best to fight him, I will not oppose you; but we will talk about it. We cannot talk now. Good-night my dear, dear brother."

She kissed him on the forehead and held both his hands for a moment, and then led him away. He obeyed mechanically, and they parted for the night.

Diana often wished her brother were a stronger man in the ordinary things of life, but she knew that he was honest, and no coward in danger, and that he always spoke the truth and kept his word. It was his fault that he always imagined every one to be as honest as himself until the contrary was proved,—after which he never trusted the man again.

Diana went slowly to her room and locked the door behind her. With a candle in her hand she entered the boudoir and looked round upon the scene of the catastrophe. The glass of the long window was still open, and the refractory blinds still closed, the bolts rusted in, beyond her strength to draw them. The servants had raised the desk upright and washed away the ink from the tiles; there was no trace of disorder visible. She could hardly realise that in this neat room, that very day, only a few hours ago, she had passed through one of the most terrible experiences of her life.

She sat down in the chair before the desk and bent her queenly head. She had done her best for the right through that day, but it had all gone by so very quickly that she doubted whether she had done wisely. It seemed as though the burden of it all rested upon her—of the right and of the wrong; and the burden was very heavy. May God in his mercy give strength and courage to all brave women doing the right!

I think that ordinary women have more moral vanity than ordinary men; but that very good men have more of it than very good women. A good man always seems to have a conviction of goodness, to be quite sure when he has done right, and to enjoy the sense of having done it. A woman's sympathies are wider and reach further than a man's. When she has done her best, there always is something more that she would do if she could, and until that is done also she can never feel the comfortable delight in godliness experienced by man, the grosser creature, who hedges his possibilities more closely, and gets rid of his superfluous aspirations by the logical demonstration of the unattainable. But the sphere of ordinary women is narrower, and their sympathies are dispersed in a greater multiplicity and divergence of small channels, so that a little goodness, a little easy charity with a pretty name, is a luscious titbit to the tongue that speaketh vanity.

It was a dreary night to every one of the four,—least of all perhaps to Julius Batiscombe, whose fierce temper was thoroughly roused and would not be calmed again for days, giving him a kind of wicked satisfaction while it lasted. He spent most of the night at his window, smoking and going over the scenes of the day, and the scenes of the future. His mind ran in the direction of fighting,—to fight any one or anything would be a rare satisfaction; and ever as he fancied some struggle possible the hot blood rushed to his temples and longed for action, so that he bit his cigar through and through, and clasped his hands together till the veins stood out like ropes. He slept a little at last, and dreamed savage dreams of hand-to-hand combat, and woke with the roar of cannon in his ears. For he was a man of exaggerated fancies when his brain worked unconsciously, like many men who have ended in celebrity or in insane asylums.

The roar of the guns was only a servant knocking at his door, with hot water and a note. He saw Diana's handwriting, and suspected a new move, so that he was not altogether astonished by the contents. He understood that she had made Marcantonio sign her writing—by what means he could not tell—in order to force the position. There was evidently nothing to be done but to go. He would not have left the villa for anything Diana could have said, in his present humour, but it was impossible to bid defiance to the master of the house. Besides, he supposed that since Carantoni had invited him to leave, Diana had said something which would lead to a challenge from her brother, which could naturally not be delivered under his own roof.