Suspense is itself a species of calamity. It has all the poignant acuteness of hope without the buoyancy of a sustained expectation, and all the anguish of despair without its sense of conclusiveness and the surcease of striving. Pending the review of the action of the court-martial Baynell discovered the wondrous scope of human suffering disassociated from physical pain. He had seriously thought he might die of his wounded pride, thus touched in honor, in patriotism, in life itself, and therefore he was amazed by the degree of solace he experienced in the sight of a woman's tears shed for his sake. For to Leonora Gwynn he seemed a persecuted martyr, with all a soldier's valor and a saint's impeccability. No one could know better than she the falsity of the charges against him, and in her resentment against the unhappy chances and the military law that had overwhelmed him, and her absolute despair for his fate, he enlisted all her heart. Those high and noble qualities which he possessed and which she revered were elicited in the extremity of his mortal peril. His exacting conscientiousness; his steadfast courage on the brink of despair; his absolute truth; his constancy in adversity; his strict sense of justice which would not suffer him to blame his friends whose concealments had wrought his ruin, nor his enemies who seemed indeed rancorously zealous in aspersing him that they might exculpate themselves at his risk; his lofty sense of honor which he valued more than life itself,--all showed in genuine proportions in the bleak unidealizing light which an actual vital crisis brings to bear on the incidents of personal character.