a week, kept silence as to Lord Dannisburgh, except in naming him among her guests.  She wrote this, which might have a secret personal signification:  ’We women are the verbs passive of the alliance; we have to learn, and if we take to activity, with the best intentions, we conjugate a frightful disturbance.  We are to run on lines, like the steam-trains, or we come to no station, dash to fragments.  I have the misfortune to know I was born an active.  I take my chance.’

Once she coupled the names of Lord Larrian and Lord Dannisburgh, remarking that she had a fatal attraction for antiques.

The death of her husband’s uncle and illness of his aunt withdrew her to The Crossways, where she remained nursing for several months, reading diligently, as her letters showed, and watching the approaches of the destroyer.  She wrote like her former self, subdued by meditation in the presence of that inevitable.  The world ceased barking.  Lady Dunstane could suppose Mr. Warwick to have now a reconciling experience of his wife’s noble qualities.  He probably did value them more.  He spoke of her to Sir Lukin in London with commendation.  ‘She is an attentive nurse.’  He inherited a considerable increase of income when he and his wife were the sole tenants of The Crossways, but disliking the house, for reasons hard to explain by a man previously professing to share her attachment to it, he wished to sell or let the place, and his wife would do neither.  She proposed to continue living in their small London house rather than be cut off from The Crossways, which, he said, was ludicrous:  people should live up to their position; and he sneered at the place, and slightly wounded her, for she was open to a wound when the cold fire of a renewed attempt at warmth between them was crackling and showing bits of flame, after she had given proof of her power to serve.  Service to himself and his relatives affected him.  He deferred to her craze for The Crossways, and they lived in a larger London house, ‘up to their position,’ which means ever a trifle beyond it, and gave choice dinner-parties to the most eminent.  His jealousy slumbered.  Having ideas of a seat in Parliament at this period, and preferment superior to the post he held, Mr. Warwick deemed it sagacious to court the potent patron Lord Dannisburgh could be; and his wife had his interests at heart, the fork-tongued world said.  The cry revived.  Stories of Lord D. and Mrs. W. whipped the hot pursuit.  The moral repute of the great Whig lord and the beauty of the lady composed inflammable material.

‘Are you altogether cautious?’ Lady Dunstane wrote to Diana; and her friend sent a copious reply:  ’You have the fullest right to ask your Tony anything, and I will answer as at the Judgement bar.  You allude to Lord Dannisburgh.  He is near what Dada’s age would have been, and is, I think I can affirm, next to my dead father and my Emmy, my dearest friend.  I love him.  I could say