He had held her hands and looked into her eyes half a minute, like a dear comrade; as little arousing her instincts of defensiveness as the clearing heavens; and sisterly love for it was his due, a sister’s kiss.  He needed a sister, and should have one in her.  Emma’s recollected talk of ‘Tom Redworth’ painted him from head to foot, brought the living man over the waters to the deck of the yacht.  A stout champion in the person of Tom Redworth was left on British land; but for some reason past analysis, intermixed, that is, among a swarm of sensations, Diana named her champion to herself with the formal prefix:  perhaps because she knew a man’s Christian name to be dangerous handling.  They differed besides frequently in opinion, when the habit of thinking of him as Mr. Redworth would be best.  Women are bound to such small observances, and especially the beautiful of the sisterhood, whom the world soon warns that they carry explosives and must particularly guard against the ignition of petty sparks.  She was less indiscreet in her thoughts than in her acts, as is the way with the reflective daughter of impulse; though she had fine mental distinctions:  what she could offer to do ‘spirit to spirit,’ for instance, held nothing to her mind of the intimacy of calling the gentleman plain Tom in mere contemplation of him.  Her friend and champion was a volunteer, far from a mercenary, and he deserved the reward, if she could bestow it unalarmed.  They were to meet in Egypt.  Meanwhile England loomed the home of hostile forces ready to shock, had she been a visible planet, and ready to secrete a virus of her past history, had she been making new.

She was happily away, borne by a whiter than swan’s wing on the sapphire Mediterranean.  Her letters to Emma were peeps of splendour for the invalid:  her way of life on board the yacht, and sketches of her host and hostess as lovers in wedlock on the other side of our perilous forties; sketches of the bays, the towns, the people-priests, dames, cavaliers, urchins, infants, shifting groups of supple southerners-flashed across the page like a web of silk, and were dashed off, redolent of herself, as lightly as the silvery spray of the blue waves she furrowed; telling, without allusions to the land behind her, that she had dipped in the wells of blissful oblivion.  Emma Dunstane, as is usual with those who receive exhilarating correspondence from makers of books, condemned the authoress in comparison, and now first saw that she had the gift of writing.  Only one cry:  ‘Italy, Eden of exiles!’ betrayed the seeming of a moan.  She wrote of her poet and others immediately.  Thither had they fled; with adieu to England!