Diana felt a hot wind across her skin.

She smiled and said:  ’Let me thank you for bringing to an end a mission that must have been unpleasant to you.’

’But you will meditate on it, Mrs. Warwick, will you not?  Give me that assurance!’

‘I shall not forget it,’ said Diana.

Again the ladies touched fingers, with an interchange of the social grimace of cordiality.  A few words of compassion for poor Lady Dunstane’s invalided state covered Lady Wathin’s retreat.

She left, it struck her ruffled sentiments, an icy libertine, whom any husband caring for his dignity and comfort was well rid of; and if only she could have contrived allusively to bring in the name of Mr. Percy Dacier, just to show these arrant coquettes, or worse, that they were not quite so privileged to pursue their intrigues obscurely as they imagined, it would have soothed her exasperation.

She left a woman the prey of panic.

Diana thought of Emma and Redworth, and of their foolish interposition to save her character and keep her bound.  She might now have been free!  The struggle with her manacles reduced her to a state of rebelliousness, from which issued vivid illuminations of the one means of certain escape; an abhorrent hissing cavern, that led to a place named Liberty, her refuge, but a hectic place.

Unable to write, hating the house which held her a fixed mark for these attacks, she had an idea of flying straight to her beloved Lugano lake, and there hiding, abandoning her friends, casting off the slave’s name she bore, and living free in spirit.  She went so far as to reckon the cost of a small household there, and justify the violent step by an exposition of retrenchment upon her large London expenditure.  She had but to say farewell to Emma, no other tie to cut!  One morning on the Salvatore heights would wash her clear of the webs defacing and entangling her.

CHAPTER XXIV

INDICATES A SOUL PREPARED FOR DESPERATION

The month was August, four days before the closing of Parliament, and Diana fancied it good for Arthur Rhodes to run down with her to Copsley.  He came to her invitation joyfully, reminding her of Lady Dunstane’s wish to hear some chapters of the cantatrice, and the Ms. was packed.  They started, taking rail and fly, and winding up the distance on foot.  August is the month of sober maturity and majestic foliage, songless, but a crowned and royal-robed queenly month; and the youngster’s appreciation of the homely scenery refreshed Diana; his delight in being with her was also pleasant.  She had no wish to exchange him for another; and that was a strengthening thought.