Diana bowed to the compact little apologue.

’I will tell you another story, traditional in our family from my great-grandmother, a Spanish woman,’ she said.  ’A cavalier serenaded his mistress, and rascal mercenaries fell upon him before he could draw sword.  He battered his guitar on their pates till the lattice opened with a cry, and startled them to flight.  “Thrice blessed and beloved!” he called to her above, in reference to the noise, “it was merely a diversion of the accompaniment.”  Now there was loyal service to a sovereign!’

‘You are certainly an angel!’ exclaimed Whitmonby.  ’I swallow the story, and leave it to digestion to discover the appositeness.  Whatever tuneful instrument one of your friends possesses shall solace your slumbers or batter the pate of your enemy.  But discourage the habitual serenader.’

‘The musician you must mean is due here now, by appointment to meet you,’ said Diana, and set him momentarily agape with the name of Mr. Percy Dacier.

That was the origin of the alliance between the young statesman and a newspaper editor.  Whitmonby, accepting proposals which suited him, quitted the house, after an hour of political talk, no longer inclined to hint at the ‘habitual serenader,’ but very ready to fall foul of those who did, as he proved when the numbers buzzed openly.  Times were masculine; the excitement on the eve of so great a crisis, and Diana’s comprehension of it and fine heading cry, put that weak matter aside.  Moreover, he was taught to suppose himself as welcome a guest as Dacier; and the cook could stand criticism; the wines—­wonderful to say of a lady’s table—­were trusty; the talk, on the political evenings and the social and anecdotal supper-nights, ran always in perfect accord with his ideal of the conversational orchestra:  an improvized harmony, unmatched elsewhere.  She did not, he considered, so perfectly assort her dinner-guests; that was her one fault.  She had therefore to strain her adroitness to cover their deficiencies and fuse them.  But what other woman could have done it!  She led superbly.  If an Irishman was present, she kept him from overflooding, managed to extract just the flavour of him, the smack of salt.  She did even, at Whitmonby’s table, on a red-letter Sunday evening, in concert with him and the Dean, bring down that cataract, the Bodleian, to the levels of interchanging dialogue by seasonable touches, inimitably done, and never done before.  Sullivan Smith, unbridled in the middle of dinner, was docile to her.  ‘Irishmen;’ she said, pleading on their behalf to Whitmonby, who pronounced the race too raw for an Olympian feast, ’are invaluable if you hang them up to smoke and cure’; and the master of social converse could not deny that they were responsive to her magic.  The supper-nights were mainly devoted to Percy’s friends.  He brought as many as he pleased, and as often as it pleased him; and it was her pride to provide Cleopatra banquets for the lover whose anxieties were soothed by them, and to whom she sacrificed her name willingly in return for a generosity that certain chance whispers of her heart elevated to the pitch of measureless.