Dacier had observed the blush, and the check to her flowing tongue did not escape him as they walked back to the inn down the narrow street of black rooms, where the women gossiped at the fountain and the cobbler threaded on his doorstep.  His novel excitement supplied the deficiency, sweeping him past minor reflections.  He was, however, surprised to hear her tell Lady Esquart, as soon as they were together at the breakfast-table, that he had the intention of starting for England; and further surprised, and slightly stung too, when on the poor lady’s, moaning over her recollection of the midnight Bell, and vowing she could not attempt to sleep another night in the place, Diana declared her resolve to stay there one day longer with her maid, and explore the neighbourhood for the wild flowers in which it abounded.  Lord and Lady Esquart agreed to anything agreeable to her, after excusing themselves for the necessitated flight, piteously relating the story of their sufferings.  My lord could have slept, but he had remained awake to comfort my lady.

‘True knightliness!’ Diana said, in praise of these long married lovers; and she asked them what they had talked of during the night.

‘You, my dear, partly,’ said Lady Esquart.

‘For an opiate?’

‘An invocation of the morning,’ said Dacier.

Lady Esquart looked at Diana and, at him.  She thought it was well that her fair friend should stay.  It was then settled for Diana to rejoin them the next evening at Lugano, thence to proceed to Luino on the Maggiore.

‘I fear it is good-bye for me,’ Dacier said to her, as he was about to step into the carriage with the Esquarts.

‘If you have not better news of your uncle, it must be,’ she replied, and gave him her hand promptly and formally, hardly diverting her eyes from Lady Esquart to grace the temporary gift with a look.  The last of her he saw was a waving of her arm and finger pointing triumphantly at the Bell in the tower.  It said, to an understanding unpractised in the feminine mysteries:  ‘I can sleep through anything.’  What that revealed of her state of conscience and her nature, his efforts to preserve the lovely optical figure blocked his guessing.  He was with her friends, who liked her the more they knew her, and he was compelled to lean to their view of the perplexing woman.

‘She is a riddle to the world,’ Lady Esquart said, ’but I know that she is good.  It is the best of signs when women take to her and are proud to be her friend.’

My lord echoed his wife.  She talked in this homely manner to stop any notion of philandering that the young gentleman might be disposed to entertain in regard to a lady so attractive to the pursuit as Diana’s beauty and delicate situation might make her seem.

’She is an exceedingly clever person, and handsomer than report, which is uncommon,’ said Dacier, becoming voluble on town-topics, Miss Asper incidentally among them.  He denied Lady Esquart’s charge of an engagement; the matter hung.