Lady Wathin closed her eyes, that the like effect might be produced on her ears.  ’Ah! they are the truths.  But it is not my business to preach.  Permit me to say that I feel deeply for your husband.’

‘I am glad of Mr. Warwick’s having friends; and they are many, I hope.’

‘They cannot behold him perishing, without an effort on his behalf.’

A chasm of silence intervened.  Wifely pity was not sounded in it.

‘He will question me, Mrs. Warwick.’

‘You can report to him the heads of our conversation, Lady Wathin.’

’Would you—­it is your husband’s most earnest wish; and our house is open to his wife and to him for the purpose; and it seems to us that . . . indeed it might avert a catastrophe you would necessarily deplore:—­would you consent to meet him at my house?’

‘It has already been asked, Lady Wathin, and refused.’

‘But at my house-under our auspices!’

Diana glanced at the clock.  ‘Nowhere.’

‘Is it not—­pardon me—­a wife’s duty, Mrs. Warwick, at least to listen?’

‘Lady Wathin, I have listened to you.’

’In the case of his extreme generosity so putting it, for the present, Mrs. Warwick, that he asks only to be heard personally by his wife!  It may preclude so much.’

Diana felt a hot wind across her skin.

She smiled and said:  ’Let me thank you for bringing to an end a mission that must have been unpleasant to you.’

’But you will meditate on it, Mrs. Warwick, will you not?  Give me that assurance!’

‘I shall not forget it,’ said Diana.

Again the ladies touched fingers, with an interchange of the social grimace of cordiality.  A few words of compassion for poor Lady Dunstane’s invalided state covered Lady Wathin’s retreat.

She left, it struck her ruffled sentiments, an icy libertine, whom any husband caring for his dignity and comfort was well rid of; and if only she could have contrived allusively to bring in the name of Mr. Percy Dacier, just to show these arrant coquettes, or worse, that they were not quite so privileged to pursue their intrigues obscurely as they imagined, it would have soothed her exasperation.

She left a woman the prey of panic.

Diana thought of Emma and Redworth, and of their foolish interposition to save her character and keep her bound.  She might now have been free!  The struggle with her manacles reduced her to a state of rebelliousness, from which issued vivid illuminations of the one means of certain escape; an abhorrent hissing cavern, that led to a place named Liberty, her refuge, but a hectic place.

Unable to write, hating the house which held her a fixed mark for these attacks, she had an idea of flying straight to her beloved Lugano lake, and there hiding, abandoning her friends, casting off the slave’s name she bore, and living free in spirit.  She went so far as to reckon the cost of a small household there, and justify the violent step by an exposition of retrenchment upon her large London expenditure.  She had but to say farewell to Emma, no other tie to cut!  One morning on the Salvatore heights would wash her clear of the webs defacing and entangling her.