He began to stumble and to make mistakes—­gross elementary mistakes in geography and fact—­and there-with to lose his temper.  Diana was upon him in a moment—­very cool and graceful—­controlling herself well; and it is probable that she would have won the day triumphantly but for the sudden intervention of her host.

Oliver Marsham had been watching her with mingled amusement and admiration.  The slender figure held defiantly erect, the hands close-locked on the knee, the curly head with the air of a Nike—­he could almost see the palm branch in the hand, the white dress and the silky hair, blown back by the blasts of victory!—­appealed to a rhetorical element in his nature always closely combined both with his feelings and his ambitions.  Headlong energy and partisanship—­he was enchanted to find how beautiful they could be, and he threw himself into the discussion simply—­at first—­that he might prolong an emotion, might keep the red burning on her lip and cheek.  That blundering fellow Barton should not have it all to himself!

But he was no sooner well in it than he too began to flounder.  He rode off upon an inaccurate telegram in a morning paper; Diana fell upon it at once, tripped it up, exposed it, drove it from the field, while Mr. Ferrier approved her from the background with a smiling eye and a quietly applauding hand.  Then Marsham quoted a speech in the Indian Council.

Diana dismissed it with contempt, as the shaft of a frondeur discredited by both parties.  He fell back on Blue Books, and other ponderosities—­Barton by this time silent, or playing a clumsy chorus.  But if Diana was not acquainted with these things in the ore, so to speak, she was more than a little acquainted with the missiles that could be forged from them.  That very afternoon Hugh Roughsedge had pointed her to some of the best.  She took them up—­a little wildly now—­for her coolness was departing—­and for a time Marsham could hardly keep his footing.

A good many listeners were by now gathered round the disputants.  Lady Niton, wielding some noisy knitting needles by the fireside, was enjoying the fray all the more that it seemed to be telling against Oliver.  Mrs. Fotheringham, on the other hand, who came up occasionally to the circle, listened and went away again, was clearly seething with suppressed wrath, and had to be restrained once or twice by her brother from interfering, in a tone which would at once have put an end to a duel he himself only wished to prolong.

Mr. Ferrier perceived her annoyance, and smiled over it.  In spite of his long friendship with the family, Isabel Fotheringham was no favorite with the great man.  She had long seemed to him a type—­a strange and modern type—­of the feminine fanatic who allows political difference to interfere not only with private friendship but with the nearest and most sacred ties; and his philosopher’s soul revolted.  Let a woman talk politics, if she must, like this eager idealist girl—­not with the venom and gall of the half-educated politician.  “As if we hadn’t enough of that already!”