Yes, and a married woman; and a proclaimed one!

And notwithstanding those brassy facts, he was ready to side with the evidence declaring her free from stain; and further, to swear that her blood was Diana’s!

Nor had Dacier ever been particularly poetical about women.  The present Diana had wakened his curiosity, had stirred his interest in her, pricked his admiration, but gradually, until a sleepless night with its flock of raven-fancies under that dominant Bell, ended by colouring her, the moment she stood in his eyes, as freshly as the morning heavens.  We are much influenced in youth by sleepless nights:  they disarm, they predispose us to submit to soft occasion; and in our youth occasion is always coming.

He heard her voice.  She had risen up the grass-mound, and he hung brooding half-way down.  She was dressed in some texture of the hue of lavender.  A violet scarf loosely knotted over the bosom opened on her throat.  The loop of her black hair curved under a hat of gray beaver.  Memorably radiant was her face.

They met, exchanged greetings, praised the beauty of the morning, and struck together on the Bell.  She laughed:  ’I heard it at ten; I slept till four.  I never wake later.  I was out in the air by half-past.  Were you disturbed?’

He alluded to his troubles with the Bell.

‘It sounded like a felon’s heart in skeleton ribs,’ he said.

‘Or a proser’s tongue in a hollow skull,’ said she.

He bowed to her conversible readiness, and at once fell into the background, as he did only with her, to perform accordant bass in their dialogue; for when a woman lightly caps our strained remarks, we gallantly surrender the leadership, lest she should too cuttingly assert her claim.

Some sweet wild cyclamen flowers were at her breast.  She held in her left hand a bunch of buds and blown cups of the pale purple meadow-crocus.  He admired them.  She told him to look round.  He confessed to not having noticed them in the grass:  what was the name?  Colchicum, in Botany, she said.

’These are plucked to be sent to a friend; otherwise I’m reluctant to take the life of flowers for a whim.  Wild flowers, I mean.  I am not sentimental about garden flowers:  they are cultivated for decoration, grown for clipping.’

‘I suppose they don’t carry the same signification,’ said Dacier, in the tone of a pupil to such themes.

‘They carry no feeling,’ said she.  ’And that is my excuse for plucking these, where they seem to spring like our town-dream of happiness.  I believe they are sensible of it too; but these must do service to my invalid friend, who cannot travel.  Are you ever as much interested in the woes of great ladies as of country damsels?  I am not—­not unless they have natural distinction.  You have met Lady Dunstane?’

The question sounded artless.  Dacier answered that he thought he had seen her somewhere once, and Diana shut her lips on a rising under-smile.