Lovely weather, beautiful dresses:  agreed.  Diana wore a yellow robe with a black bonnet, and he commented on the becoming hues; for the first time, he noticed her dress!  Lovely women?  Dacier hesitated.  One he saw.  But surely he must admire Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett?  And who steps beside her, transparently fascinated, with visage at three-quarters to the rays within her bonnet?  Can it be Sir Lukin Dunstane? and beholding none but his charmer!

Dacier withdrew his eyes thoughtfully from the spectacle, and moved to woo Diana to a stroll.  She could not restrain her feet; she was out of the ring of her courtiers for the moment.  He had seized his opportunity.

‘It is nearly a year!’ he said.

‘I have been nursing nearly all the time, doing the work I do best.’

‘Unaltered?’

‘A year must leave its marks.’

‘Tony!’

’You speak of a madwoman, a good eleven months dead.  Let her rest.  Those are the conditions.’

‘Accepted, if I may see her.’

‘Honestly accepted?’

’Imposed fatally, I have to own.  I have felt with you:  you are the wiser.  But, admitting that, surely we can meet.  I may see you?’

‘My house has not been shut.’

‘I respected the house.  I distrusted myself.’

‘What restores your confidence?’

‘The strength I draw from you.’

One of the Beauties at a garden-party is lucky to get as many minutes as had passed in quietness.  Diana was met and captured.  But those last words of Percy’s renewed her pride in him by suddenly building a firm faith in herself.  Noblest of lovers! she thought, and brooded on the little that had been spoken, the much conveyed, for a proof of perfect truthfulness.

The world had watched them.  It pronounced them discreet if culpable; probably cold to the passion both.  Of Dacier’s coldness it had no doubt, and Diana’s was presumed from her comical flights of speech.  She was given to him because of the known failure of her other adorers.  He in the front rank of politicians attracted her with the lustre of his ambition; she him with her mingling of talent and beauty.  An astute world; right in the main, owing to perceptions based upon brute nature; utterly astray in particulars, for the reason that it takes no count of the soul of man or woman.  Hence its glee at a catastrophe; its poor stock of mercy.  And when no catastrophe follows, the prophet, for the honour of the profession, must decry her as cunning beyond aught yet revealed of a serpent sex.