‘So it must be to-morrow,’ said he, reading her closely, ’not later.  Better at once.  But women are not to be hurried.’

‘Oh! don’t class me, Percy, pray!  I think of you, not of myself.’

‘You suppose that in a day or two I might vary?’

She fixed her eyes on him, expressing certainty of his unalterable stedfastness.  The look allured.  It changed:  her head shook.  She held away and said:  ’No, leave me; leave me, dear, dear friend.  Percy, my dearest!  I will not “play the sex.”  I am yours if . . . if it is your wish.  It may as well be to-morrow.  Here I am useless; I cannot write, not screw a thought from my head.  I dread that “process of the Law” a second time.  To-morrow, if it must be.  But no impulses.  Fortune is blind; she may be kind to us.  The blindness of Fortune is her one merit, and fools accuse her of it, and they profit by it!  I fear we all of us have our turn of folly:  we throw the stake for good luck.  I hope my sin is not very great.  I know my position is desperate.  I feel a culprit.  But I am sure I have courage, perhaps brains to help.  At any rate, I may say this:  I bring no burden to my lover that he does not know of.’

Dacier pressed her hand.  ’Money we shall have enough.  My uncle has left me fairly supplied.’

‘What would he think?’ said Diana, half in a glimpse of meditation.

’Think me the luckiest of the breeched.  I fancy I hear him thanking you for “making a man” of me.’

She blushed.  Some such phrase might have been spoken by Lord Dannisburgh.

‘I have but a poor sum of money,’ she said.  ’I may be able to write abroad.  Here I cannot—­if I am to be persecuted.’

‘You shall write, with a new pen!’ said Dacier.  ’You shall live, my darling Tony.  You have been held too long in this miserable suspension, neither maid nor wife, neither woman nor stockfish.  Ah! shameful.  But we ’ll right it.  The step, for us, is the most reasonable that could be considered.  You shake your head.  But the circumstances make it so.  Courage, and we come to happiness!  And that, for you and me, means work.  Look at the case of Lord and Lady Dulac.  It’s identical, except that she is no match beside you:  and I do not compare her antecedents with yours.  But she braved the leap, and forced the world to swallow it, and now, you see, she’s perfectly honoured.  I know a place on a peak of the Maritime Alps, exquisite in summer, cool, perfectly solitary, no English, snow round us, pastures at our feet, and the Mediterranean below.  There! my Tony.  To-morrow night we start.  You will meet me-shall I call here?—­ well, then at the railway station, the South-Eastern, for Paris:  say, twenty minutes to eight.  I have your pledge?  You will come?’

She sighed it, then said it firmly, to be worthy of him.  Kind Fortune, peeping under the edge of her bandaged eyes, appeared willing to bestow the beginning of happiness upon one who thought she had a claim to a small taste of it before she died.  It seemed distinguishingly done, to give a bite of happiness to the starving!