Now indeed Dinah's soul fainted for a few moments. She hated things hid; she loved events to be direct and open; but already some need for hiding her thought, if not her actions, had become imperative and now she saw a complication arising that she had never taken into account: the collision between Lawrence and Ben Bamsey. What might be right and honest enough to her and her lover--what was already clean and clear in her mind, and would, she did not doubt, be presently equally clean and clear to Lawrence--must emphatically be neither righteous nor thinkable to the generation of Mr. Bamsey. None else indeed mattered; but he did. Great vistas of time began to stretch between her and her lover. He retreated; but the gathering difficulties did not daunt her since the end was assured. For a season life was now suspended at the bedside of an old man, and Dinah returned home to plunge at once into the battle for her foster-father's existence. It was a battle fought unfairly for her, and not until the end of it did Dinah discover the tremendous effect of her exertions on her own vitality; for she was in a position false and painful from the first, being called at the will of one very sick to minister to him before his own, and to suffer from the effects of his unconscious selfishness, under the jealousy of the other women who were nearer to him. Ben rapidly became very ill indeed, with congestion of the lungs, and for a time, while in the extremity of suffering, his usual patient understanding deserted him and facts he strove to keep concealed in health under conditions of disease appeared. They were no secret to Faith Bamsey and she was schooled to suffer them, being able the easier so to do, because she was just and knew the situation was not Dinah's fault. Indeed they created suffering for the girl also. But to Jane, her father's now unconcealed preference for Dinah, his impatience when she was absent and his reiterated desire to have her beside him, inflamed open wounds and made her harsh. Her mother argued with her half-heartedly, but did not blame her any more than she blamed Dinah. She knew her husband's armour was off, and that he could not help extending a revelation of the truth beyond her heart, where she had hoped it was hidden; but she was human and the fact that everybody, thanks to Jane, now knew that she and her own child were less to Benjamin than his foster-daughter, distressed her and sometimes clouded her temper.