‘But speak, speak!  What is it?’ Diana said.

’That if we delay, I ‘m in danger of losing you altogether.’

Her eyes lightened:  ‘You mean that you have heard he has determined—?’

’There’s a process of the law.  But stop it.  Just this one step, and it ends.  Whether intended or not, it hangs over you, and you will be perpetually tormented.  Why waste your whole youth?—­and mine as well!  For I am bound to you as much as if we had stood at the altar—­where we will stand together the instant you are free.’

’But where have you heard . . .?

’From an intimate friend.  I will tell you—­sufficiently intimate—­from Lady Wathin.  Nothing of a friend, but I see this woman at times.  She chose to speak of it to me it doesn’t matter why.  She is in his confidence, and pitched me a whimpering tale.  Let those people chatter.  But it ’s exactly for those people that you are hanging in chains, all your youth shrivelling.  Let them shout their worst!  It’s the bark of a day; and you won’t hear it; half a year, and it will be over, and I shall bring you back—­the husband of the noblest bride in Christendom!  You don’t mistrust me?’

‘It is not that,’ said she.  ‘But now drop my hand.  I am imprisoned.’

’It’s asking too much.  I’ve lost you—­too many times.  I have the hand and I keep it.  I take nothing but the hand.  It’s the hand I want.  I give you mine.  I love you.  Now I know what love is!—­and the word carries nothing of its weight.  Tell me you do not doubt my honour.’

’Not at all.  But be rational.  I must think, and I cannot while you keep my hand.’

He kissed it.  ‘I keep my own against the world.’

A cry of rebuke swelled to her lips at his conqueror’s tone.  It was not uttered, for directness was in his character and his wooing loyal—­save for bitter circumstances, delicious to hear; and so narrow was the ring he had wound about her senses, that her loathing of the circumstances pushed her to acknowledge within her bell of a heart her love for him.

He was luckless enough to say:  ‘Diana!’

It rang horridly of her husband.  She drew her hand to loosen it, with repulsing brows.  ‘Not that name!’

Dacier was too full of his honest advocacy of the passionate lover to take a rebuff.  There lay his unconscious mastery, where the common arts of attack would have tripped him with a quick-witted woman, and where a man of passion, not allowing her to succumb in dignity, would have alarmed her to the breaking loose from him.

‘Lady Dunstane calls you Tony.’

‘She is my dearest and oldest friend.’

’You and I don’t count by years.  You are the dearest to me on earth, Tony!’

She debated as to forbidding that name.

The moment’s pause wrapped her in a mental hurricane, out of which she came with a heart stopped, her olive cheeks ashen-hued.  She had seen that the step was possible.