‘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.

‘Oh!  Percy, Percy, are we mad?’

’Not mad.  We take what is ours.  Tell me, have I ever, ever disrespected you?  You were sacred to me; and you are, though now the change has come.  Look back on it—­it is time lost, years that are dust.  But look forward, and you cannot imagine our separation.  What I propose is plain sense for us two.  Since Rovio, I have been at your feet.  Have I not some just claim for recompense?  Tell me!  Tony!’

The sweetness of the secret name, the privileged name, in his mouth stole through her blood, melting resistance.

She had consented.  The swarthy flaming of her face avowed it even more than the surrender of her hand.  He gained much by claiming little:  he respected her, gave her no touches of fright and shame; and it was her glory to fall with pride.  An attempt at a caress would have awakened her view of the whitherward:  but she was treated as a sovereign lady rationally advised.

‘Is it since Rovio, Percy?’

‘Since the morning when you refused me one little flower.’

‘If I had given it, you might have been saved!’

‘I fancy I was doomed from the beginning.’