Gallantly had the veteran General and Hero held on into the night, that the festivity might not be dashed by his departure; perhaps, to a certain degree, to prolong his enjoyment of a flattering scene.  At last Sir Lukin had the word from him, and came to his wife.  Diana slipped across the floor to her accommodating chaperon, whom, for the sake of another five minutes with her beloved Emma, she very agreeably persuaded to walk in the train of Lord Larrian, and forth they trooped down a pathway of nodding heads and curtsies, resembling oak and birch-trees under a tempered gale, even to the shedding of leaves, for here a turban was picked up by Sir Lukin, there a jewelled ear-ring by the self-constituted attendant, Mr. Thomas Redworth.  At the portico rang a wakening cheer, really worth hearing.  The rain it rained, and hats were formless,’ as in the first conception of the edifice, backs were damp, boots liquidly musical, the pipe of consolation smoked with difficulty, with much pulling at the stem, but the cheer arose magnificently, and multiplied itself, touching at the same moment the heavens and Diana’s heart-at least, drawing them together; for she felt exalted, enraptured, as proud of her countrymen as of their hero.

‘That’s the natural shamrock, after the artificial!’ she heard Mr. Redworth say, behind her.

She turned and sent one of her brilliant glances flying over him, in gratitude for a timely word well said.  And she never forgot the remark, nor he the look.

CHAPTER IV

CONTAINING HINTS OF DIANA’S EXPERIENCES AND OF WHAT THEY LED TO

A fortnight after this memorable Ball the principal actors of both sexes had crossed the Channel back to England, and old Ireland was left to her rains from above and her undrained bogs below; her physical and her mental vapours; her ailments and her bog-bred doctors; as to whom the governing country trusted they would be silent or discourse humorously.

The residence of Sir Lukin Dunstane, in the county of Surrey, inherited by him during his recent term of Indian services, was on the hills, where a day of Italian sky, or better, a day of our breezy South-west, washed from the showery night, gives distantly a tower to view, and a murky web, not without colour:  the ever-flying banner of the metropolis, the smoke of the city’s chimneys, if you prefer plain language.  At a first inspection of the house, Lady Dunstane did not like it, and it was advertized to be let, and the auctioneer proclaimed it in his dialect.  Her taste was delicate; she had the sensitiveness of an invalid:  twice she read the stalking advertizement of the attractions of Copsley, and hearing Diana call it ‘the plush of speech,’ she shuddered; she decided that a place where her husband’s family had lived ought not to stand forth meretriciously spangled and daubed, like a show-booth at a fair, for a bait; though the grandiloquent man of advertizing letters assured Sir Lukin that a public agape for the big and gaudy mouthful is in no milder way to be caught; as it is apparently the case.  She withdrew the trumpeting placard.  Retract we likewise ‘banner of the metropolis.’  That plush of speech haunts all efforts to swell and illuminate citizen prose to a princely poetic.