The twofold pity which had roused Grantley from a lethargy of feeling, misconceived as self-control, had its counterpart in the triple blow with which the course of events assailed Sibylla's estimate of herself. In the first place, the news about young Blake announced in Janet Selford's letter--indirectly indeed, but yet with a confident satisfaction--made her ask whether her great sacrifice had been offered at a worthy shrine, and her great offering received with more than a shallow and transitory appreciation. In the second, the thought and image of the Courtland children spoke loud to the instinct which her ideas had lulled to sleep, bitterly accusing her desertion of the child and her indifference to his fate, rousing her ever underlying remorse to quick and vengeful life. Lastly, she was stirred to see and recognise the significance of the third turn of fate--the meaning of the nemesis which had fallen on Harriet Courtland: how she had let her rage spare nothing, neither self-respect, nor decency, nor love; and how, in the end, thus enthroned in tyranny, it had not spared herself. The three accusations, each with its special import, each taking up a distinct aspect of the truth, and enforcing it with a poignant example, joined their indictments into one, and, thus united, cried out their condemnation of her, taking for their mouthpiece Christine Fanshaw's pretty lips, using her daintily scornful voice, and the trenchant uncompromising words from which the utterer herself had afterwards recoiled as too coarse and crude to be a legitimate weapon of attack. The logic of events was not so squeamish; it does not deal in glosses or in paraphrase; it is blunt, naked, and merciless, and must be, since only when all other appeals and warnings have failed does its appointed work begin. It fastened with what almost seemed malicious glee on Christine's biting word, and enforced it by a pitiless vividness of memory, an unceasing echo in Sibylla's thoughts. Her emotions had gone "sprawling" over everything. The description did not need elaboration. It was abominably expressive and sufficient. And it did not admit of pleading or of extenuation. It showed her touching, on one extreme, Blake's shallow and spurious sentiment; on the other, Harriet Courtland's licence of anger. It pointed her attention to the ruin of Tom's life, to the piteous plight of his children, to Harriet's fate, to Blake's facile forgetfulness of love too heedlessly and wantonly offered. It stripped her fantastic ideas of their garish finery, leaving them, in the revulsion of her feelings, bereft of all beauty and attractiveness. Impelled to look back, she seemed to find the same trail over everything--even in those childish days of which Jeremy Chiddingfold had once given a description that would not have reassured her; even in the beginning of her acquaintance with Grantley, in the ready rapture of her first love, in the intoxication of the fairy ride.