‘That is the task, with one who utters jewels, Mr. Dacier.’

‘Bright wit, I fear, is above the powers of your art.’

‘Still I feel it could be done.  See—­now—­that!’

Diana’s lips had opened to say:  ’Confess me a model model:  I am dissected while I sit for portrayal.  I must be for a moment like the frog of the two countrymen who were disputing as to the manner of his death, when he stretched to yawn, upon which they agreed that he had defeated the truth for both of them.  I am not quite inanimate.’

‘Irish countrymen,’ said Dacier.

’The story adds, that blows were arrested; so confer the nationality as you please.’

Diana had often to divert him from a too intent perusal of her features with sparkles and stories current or invented to serve the immediate purpose.

Miss Paynham was Mrs. Warwick’s guest for a fortnight, and observed them together.  She sometimes charitably laid down her pencil and left them, having forgotten this or that.  They were conversing of general matters with their usual crisp precision on her return, and she was rather like the two countrymen, in debating whether it was excess of coolness or discreetness; though she was convinced of their inclinations, and expected love some day to be leaping up.  Diana noticed that she had no reminder for leaving the room when it was Mr. Redworth present.  These two had become very friendly, according to her hopes; and Miss Paynham was extremely solicitous to draw suggestions from Mr. Redworth and win his approval.

‘Do I appear likely to catch the mouth now, do you think, Mr. Redworth?’

He remarked, smiling at Diana’s expressive dimple, that the mouth was difficult to catch.  He did not gaze intently.  Mr. Redworth was the genius of friendship, ‘the friend of women,’ Mrs. Warwick had said of him.  Miss Paynham discovered it, as regarded herself.  The portrait was his commission to her, kindly proposed, secretly of course, to give her occupation and the chance of winning a vogue with the face of a famous Beauty.  So many, however, were Mrs. Warwick’s visitors, and so lively the chatter she directed, that accurate sketching was difficult to an amateurish hand.  Whitmonby, Sullivan Smith, Westlake, Henry Wilmers, Arthur Rhodes, and other gentlemen, literary and military, were almost daily visitors when it became known that the tedium of the beautiful sitter required beguiling and there was a certainty of finding her at home.  On Mrs. Warwick’s Wednesday numerous ladies decorated the group.  Then was heard such a rillet of dialogue without scandal or politics, as nowhere else in Britain; all vowed it subsequently; for to the remembrance it seemed magical.  Not a breath of scandal, and yet the liveliest flow.  Lady Pennon came attended by a Mr. Alexander Hepburn, a handsome Scot, at whom Dacier shot one of his instinctive keen glances, before seeing that the hostess had mounted a transient colour.  Mr. Hepburn, in settling himself on his chair rather too briskly, contrived the next minute to break a precious bit of China standing by his elbow; and Lady Pennon cried out, with sympathetic anguish:  ’Oh, my dear, what a trial for you!’