When, further, it is a woman planted in a burning blush, having to idealize her feminine weakness, that she may not rebuke herself for grovelling, the mean material acts by which she sustains a tottering position are speedily swallowed in the one pervading flame.  She sees but an ashen curl of the path she has traversed to safety, if anything.

Knowing her lover was to come in the morning, Diana’s thoughts dwelt wholly upon the way to tell him, as tenderly as possible without danger to herself, that her time for entertaining was over until she had finished her book; indefinitely, therefore.  The apprehension of his complaining pricked the memory that she had something to forgive.  He had sunk her in her own esteem by compelling her to see her woman’s softness.  But how high above all other men her experience of him could place him notwithstanding!  He had bowed to the figure of herself, dearer than herself, that she set before him:  and it was a true figure to the world; a too fictitious to any but the most knightly of lovers.  She forgave; and a shudder seized her.—­Snake! she rebuked the delicious run of fire through her veins; for she vas not like the idol women of imperishable type, who are never for a twinkle the prey of the blood:  statues created by man’s common desire to impress upon the sex his possessing pattern of them as domestic decorations.

When she entered the room to Dacier and they touched hands, she rejoiced in her coolness, without any other feeling or perception active.  Not to be unkind, not too kind:  this was her task.  She waited for the passage of commonplaces.

‘You slept well, Percy?’

‘Yes; and you?’

‘I don’t think I even dreamed.’

They sat.  She noticed the cloud on him and waited for his allusion to it, anxious concerning him simply.

Dacier flung the hair off his temples.  Words of Titanic formation were hurling in his head at journals and journalists.  He muttered his disgust of them.

‘Is there anything to annoy you in the papers to-day?’ she asked, and thought how handsome his face was in anger.

The paper of Mr. Tonans was named by him.  ’You have not seen it?

‘I have not opened it yet.’

He sprang up.  ’The truth is, those fellows can now afford to buy right and left, corrupt every soul alive!  There must have been a spy at the keyhole.  I’m pretty certain—­I could swear it was not breathed to any ear but mine; and there it is this morning in black and white.’

‘What is?’ cried Diana, turning to him on her chair.

‘The thing I told you last night.’

Her lips worked, as if to spell the thing.  ‘Printed, do you say?’ she rose.

’Printed.  In a leading article, loud as a trumpet; a hue and cry running from end to end of the country.  And my Chief has already had the satisfaction of seeing the secret he confided to me yesterday roared in all the thoroughfares this morning.  They’ve got the facts:  his decision to propose it, and the date—­the whole of it!  But who could have betrayed it?’