Dahlia lay engulphed.’ She will not marry a man who fancies he has anything to pardon, and when he lamely protests that Dahlia has nothing to do with her, she bursts out: ‘We are one, and will be till we die. I feel my sister’s hand in mine, though she’s away and lost. She’s my darling forever and ever. We’re one.’ Pushed by admiration and love, Robert unmasks himself. Some of his phrases have a Shakesperean ring. He half conquers the fierce, proud girl by a promise to help Dahlia. He shows himself still stronger in his interview with Squire Blancove, when the farmer calls to accuse Algernon and beg to have his daughter found; and still more startlingly when he returns to his birth-place, and dodges the young men, flinging written and public insolences at them. Edward, returned to his natural element, shows a mixture of cynicism and lingering conscience that he only loses in the fiery ordeal awaiting him, when to his and our surprise he finds himself in possession of a passionately-stirred heart. In Robert’s native village, where Edward is staying, we meet one slimy wretch called Sedgett, who is destined to be the hero of a horrid conspiracy against Dahlia. Everyone seems to be more or less mixed up in it--Robert, Rhoda, and Farmer Fleming with a sense of duty, Algernon in idle villainy, Mrs. Lovett through intrigue, and Edward as a door of escape from his own responsibilities. Was ever one poor unhappy girl so beset by friends and foes and cruel circumstances to drive her to madness? On the part of her family, strength and stern tenderness resolve for her greater misery; on that of Edward, vanity and cowardice. Abandoned, she falls ill, goes to a hospital, and comes out a broken flower, permanently bent by the storm. What refuge in the eyes of those who unkindly desire her good is there for her but marriage--with any man whose name she may bear? As for Edward, in his profound remorse and repentance, all Kentish faces are turned ruthlessly against him, against his offer of atonement, and poor Dahlia’s cry for his tenderness. Rhoda is his fiercest and most pitiless enemy. Dahlia’s letters to him have been suppressed by Algernon, who himself has pleasurable visions of marriage with the victim’s sister, and the wild ramping life of the colonies. The general decision is that Dahlia shall marry the loathsome yokel Sedgett, without any thought of the barbarous sacrifice, worse than death for her. And the ruffian is to get a thousand pounds for taking this tarnished jewel--such is the morality of the majority. Pass a woman straight from illegal arms into those of a husband, and you wash her white. The legal repetition transforms the position into virtue.