ad been exactly followed. There had been no
"hurrying it." Only in these weeks before Parliament, while matters of
great moment to his own political future were going forward, and his
participation in them was not a whit less cool and keen than it had
always been, he had still found abundant time for the wooing of Diana.
He had assumed a kind of guardian's attitude in the matter of her
relations to the Vavasours--who in business affairs had proved both
greedy and muddle-headed; he had flattered her woman's vanity by the
insight he had freely allowed her into the possibilities and the
difficulties of his own Parliamentary position, and of his relations to
Ferrier; and he had kept alive a kind of perpetual interest and flutter
in her mind concerning him, by the challenge he was perpetually offering
to the opinions and ideas in which she had been brought up--while yet
combining it with a respect toward her father's memory, so courteous,
and, in truth, sincere, that she was alternately roused and subdued.

On this February evening, it seemed to his exultant sense, as Diana sat
chatting to him beside the fire, that his power with her had
substantially advanced, that by a hundred subtle signs--quite
involuntary on her part--she let him understand that his personality was
pressing upon hers, penetrating her will, transforming her gay and
fearless composure.

For instance, he had been lending her books representing his own
political and social opinions. To her they were anathema. Her father's
soul in her regarded them as forces of the pit, rising in ugly clamor to
drag down England from her ancient place. But to hate and shudder at
them from afar had been comparatively easy. To battle with them at close
quarters, as presented by this able and courteous antagonist, who passed
so easily and without presumption from the opponent into the teacher,
was a more teasing matter. She had many small successes and
side-victories, but they soon ceased to satisfy her, in presence of the
knowledge and ability of a man who had been ten years in Parliament, and
had made for himself--she began to understand--a considerable position
there. She was hotly loyal to her own faiths; but she was conscious of
what often seemed to her a dangerous and demoralizing interest in his! A
demoralizing pleasure, too, in listening--in sometimes laying aside the
watchful, hostile air, in showing herself sweet, yielding, receptive.

These melting moods, indeed, w