they agreed likewise.  ’You may be sure she is a constant friend,’ Lady Dunstane said for his comfort; and she reminded herself subsequently of a shade of disappointment at his imperturbable rejoinder:  ‘I could calculate on it.’  For though not at all desiring to witness the sentimental fit, she wished to see that he held an image of Diana:—­surely a woman to kindle poets and heroes, the princes of the race; and it was a curious perversity that the two men she had moved were merely excellent, emotionless, ordinary men, with heads for business.  Elsewhere, out of England, Diana would have been a woman for a place in song, exalted to the skies.  Here she had the destiny to inflame Mr. Redworth and Mr. Warwick, two railway Directors, bent upon scoring the country to the likeness of a child’s lines of hop-scotch in a gravel-yard.

As with all invalids, the pleasure of living backward was haunted by the tortures it evoked, and two years later she recalled this outcry against the Fates.  She would then have prayed for Diana to inflame none but such men as those two.  The original error was; of course, that rash and most inexplicable marriage, a step never alluded to by the driven victim of it.  Lady Dunstane heard rumours of dissensions.  Diana did not mention them.  She spoke of her husband as unlucky in railway ventures, and of a household necessity for money, nothing further.  One day she wrote of a Government appointment her husband had received, ending the letter:  ’So there is the end of our troubles.’  Her friend rejoiced, and afterward looking back at her satisfaction, saw the dire beginning of them.

Lord Dannisburgh’s name, as one of the admirers of Mrs. Warwick, was dropped once or twice by Sir Lukin.  He had dined with the Warwicks, and met the eminent member of the Cabinet at their table.  There is no harm in admiration, especially on the part of one of a crowd observing a star.  No harm can be imputed when the husband of a beautiful woman accepts an appointment from the potent Minister admiring her.  So Lady Dunstane thought, for she was sure of Diana to her inmost soul.  But she soon perceived in Sir Lukin that the old Dog-world was preparing to yelp on a scent.  He of his nature belonged to the hunting pack, and with a cordial feeling for the quarry, he was quite with his world in expecting to see her run, and readiness to join the chase.  No great scandal had occurred for several months.  The world was in want of it; and he, too, with a very cordial feeling for the quarry, piously hoping she would escape, already had his nose to ground, collecting testimony in the track of her.  He said little to his wife, but his world was getting so noisy that he could not help half pursing his lips, as with the soft whistle of an innuendo at the heels of it.  Redworth was in America, engaged in carving up that hemisphere.  She had no source of information but her husband’s chance gossip; and London was death to her; and Diana, writing faithfully twice