Percy she had still neither written to nor heard from, and she dared not hope to meet him.  She fancied a wish to have tidings of his marriage:  it would be peace; if in desolation.  Now that she had confessed and given her pledge to Emma, she had so far broken with him as to render the holding him chained a cruelty, and his reserve whispered of a rational acceptance of the end between them.  She thanked him for it; an act whereby she was:  instantly melted to such softness that a dread of him haunted her.  Coward, take up your burden for armour! she called to her poor dungeoned self wailing to have common nourishment.  She knew how prodigiously it waxed on crumbs; nay, on the imagination of small morsels.  By way of chastizing it, she reviewed her life, her behaviour to her husband, until she sank backward to a depth deprived of air and light.  That life with her husband was a dungeon to her nature deeper than any imposed by present conditions.  She was then a revolutionary to reach to the breath of day.  She had now to be, only not a coward, and she could breathe as others did.  ’Women who sap the moral laws pull down the pillars of the temple on their sex,’ Emma had said.  Diana perceived something of her personal debt to civilization.  Her struggles passed into the doomed cantatrice occupying days and nights under pressure for immediate payment; the silencing of friend Debit, ridiculously calling himself Credit, in contempt of sex and conduct, on the ground, that he was he solely by virtue of being she.  He had got a trick of singing operatic solos in the form and style of the delightful tenor Tellio, and they were touching in absurdity, most real in unreality.  Exquisitely trilled, after Tellio’s manner,

          ’The tradesmen all beseech ye,
          The landlord, cook and maid,
          Complete the cantatrice,
          That they may soon be paid.’

provoked her to laughter in pathos.  He approached, posturing himself operatically, with perpetual new verses, rhymes to Danvers, rhymes to Madame Sybille, the cook.  Seeing Tellio at one of Henry Wilmers’ private concerts, Diana’s lips twitched to dimples at the likeness her familiar had assumed.  She had to compose her countenance to talk to him; but the moment of song was the trial.  Lady Singleby sat beside her, and remarked: 

‘You have always fun going on in you!’ She partook of the general impression that Diana Warwick was too humorous to nurse a downright passion.

Before leaving, she engaged Diana to her annual garden-party of the closing season, and there the meeting with Percy occurred, not unobserved.  Had they been overheard, very little to implicate them would have been gathered.  He walked in full view across the lawn to her, and they presented mask to mask.

‘The beauty of the day tempts you at last, Mrs. Warwick.’

‘I have been finishing a piece of work.’

Lovely weather, beautiful dresses:  agreed.  Diana wore a yellow robe with a black bonnet, and he commented on the becoming hues; for the first time, he noticed her dress!  Lovely women?  Dacier hesitated.  One he saw.  But surely he must admire Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett?  And who steps beside her, transparently fascinated, with visage at three-quarters to the rays within her bonnet?  Can it be Sir Lukin Dunstane? and beholding none but his charmer!