‘Oh! you must first believe the woman to have one.’

‘You are working on it?’

’By fits.  And I forgot, Mr. Redworth:  I have mislaid my receipts, and must ask you for the address of your wine-merchant;—­or, will you?  Several dozen of the same wines.  I can trust him to be in awe of you, and the good repute of my table depends on his honesty.’

Redworth took the definite order for a large supply of wine.

She gave him her hand:  a lost hand, dear to hold, needing to be guided, he feared.  For him, it was merely a hand, cut off from the wrist; and he had performed that executive part!  A wiser man would now have been the lord of it . . . .  So he felt, with his burning wish to protect and cherish the beloved woman, while saying:  ’If we find a speedy bidder for The Crossways, you will have to thank our railways.’

‘You!’ said Diana, confident in his ability to do every-thing of the practical kind.

Her ingenuousness tickled him.  He missed her comic touches upon men and things, but the fever shown by her manner accounted for it.

As soon as he left her, she was writing to the lover who had an hour previously been hearing her voice; the note of her theme being Party; and how to serve it, when to sacrifice it to the Country.  She wrote, carolling bars of the Puritani marches; and such will passion do, that her choice of music was quite in harmony with her theme.  The martially-amorous melodies of Italian Opera in those days fostered a passion challenged to intrepidity from the heart of softness; gliding at the same time, and putting warm blood even into dull arithmetical figures which might be important to her lover, her hero fronting battle.  She condensed Redworth’s information skilfully, heartily giving it and whatever she had imbibed, as her own, down to the remark:  ’Common sense in questions of justice, is a weapon that makes way into human heads and wins the certain majority, if we strike with it incessantly.’  Whether anything she wrote was her own, mattered little:  the savour of Percy’s praise, which none could share with her, made it instantly all her own.  Besides she wrote to strengthen him; she naturally laid her friends and the world under contribution; and no other sort of writing was possible.  Percy had not a common interest in fiction; still less for high comedy.  He liked the broad laugh when he deigned to open books of that sort; puns and strong flavours and harlequin surprises; and her work would not admit of them, however great her willingness to force her hand for his amusement:  consequently her inventiveness deadened.  She had to cease whipping it.  ‘My poor old London cabhorse of a pen shall go to grass!’ she sighed, looking to the sale of The Crossways for money; looking no farther.