His letters at Lugano summoned him to England instantly.

‘I have taken leave of Mrs. Warwick, but tell her I regret, et caetera,’ he said; ’and by the way, as my uncle’s illness appears to be serious, the longer she is absent the better, perhaps.’

‘It would never do,’ said Lady Esquart, understanding his drift immediately.  ’We winter in Rome.  She will not abandon us—­I have her word for it.  Next Easter we are in Paris; and so home, I suppose.  There will be no hurry before we are due at Cowes.  We seem to have become confirmed wanderers; for two of us at least it is likely to be our last great tour.’

Dacier informed her that he had pledged his word to write to Mrs. Warwick of his uncle’s condition, and the several appointed halting-places of the Esquarts between the lakes and Florence were named to him.  Thus all things were openly treated; all had an air of being on the surface; the communications passing between Mrs. Warwick and the Hon. Percy Dacier might have been perused by all the world.  None but that portion of it, sage in suspiciousness, which objects to such communications under any circumstances, could have detected in their correspondence a spark of coming fire or that there was common warmth.  She did not feel it, nor did he.  The position of the two interdicted it to a couple honourably sensible of social decencies; and who were, be it added, kept apart.  The blood is the treacherous element in the story of the nobly civilized, of which secret Diana, a wife and no wife, a prisoner in liberty, a blooming woman imagining herself restored to transcendent maiden ecstacies—­the highest youthful poetic—­had received some faint intimation when the blush flamed suddenly in her cheeks and her heart knelled like the towers of a city given over to the devourer.  She had no wish to meet him again.  Without telling herself why, she would have shunned the meeting.  Disturbers that thwarted her simple happiness in sublime scenery were best avoided.  She thought so the more for a fitful blur to the simplicity of her sensations, and a task she sometimes had in restoring and toning them, after that sweet morning time in Rovio.

CHAPTER XVII

‘The princess Egeria’

London, say what we will of it, is after all the head of the British giant, and if not the liveliest in bubbles, it is past competition the largest broth-pot of brains anywhere simmering on the hob:  over the steadiest of furnaces too.  And the oceans and the continents, as you know, are perpetual and copious contributors, either to the heating apparatus or to the contents of the pot.  Let grander similes besought.  This one fits for the smoky receptacle cherishing millions, magnetic to tens of millions more, with its caked outside of grime, and the inward substance incessantly kicking the lid, prankish, but never casting it off.  A good stew, you perceive; not a parlous boiling.  Weak as we may be in our domestic cookery, our political has been sagaciously adjusted as yet to catch the ardours of the furnace without being subject to their volcanic activities.