and explore the
neighbourhood for the wild flowers in which it abounded. Lord and Lady
Esquart agreed to anything agreeable to her, after excusing themselves
for the necessitated flight, piteously relating the story of their
sufferings. My lord could have slept, but he had remained awake to
comfort my lady.

'True knightliness!' Diana said, in praise of these long married lovers;
and she asked them what they had talked of during the night.

'You, my dear, partly,' said Lady Esquart.

'For an opiate?'

'An invocation of the morning,' said Dacier.

Lady Esquart looked at Diana and, at him. She thought it was well that
her fair friend should stay. It was then settled for Diana to rejoin
them the next evening at Lugano, thence to proceed to Luino on the
Maggiore.

'I fear it is good-bye for me,' Dacier said to her, as he was about to
step into the carriage with the Esquarts.

'If you have not better news of your uncle, it must be,' she replied,
and gave him her hand promptly and formally, hardly diverting her eyes
from Lady Esquart to grace the temporary gift with a look. The last of
her he saw was a waving of her arm and finger pointing triumphantly at
the Bell in the tower. It said, to an understanding unpractised in the
feminine mysteries: 'I can sleep through anything.' What that revealed
of her state of conscience and her nature, his efforts to preserve the
lovely optical figure blocked his guessing. He was with her friends, who
liked her the more they knew her, and he was compelled to lean to their
view of the perplexing woman.

'She is a riddle to the world,' Lady Esquart said, 'but I know that she
is good. It is the best of signs when women take to her and are proud to
be her friend.'

My lord echoed his wife. She talked in this homely manner to stop any
notion of philandering that the young gentleman might be disposed to
entertain in regard to a lady so attractive to the pursuit as Diana's
beauty and delicate situation might make her seem.

'She is an exceedingly clever person, and handsomer than report, which
is uncommon,' said Dacier, becoming voluble on town-topics, Miss
Asper incidentally among them. He denied Lady Esquart's charge of an
engagement; the matter hung.

His letters at Lugano summoned him to England instantly.

'I have taken leave of Mrs. Warwick, but tell her I regret, et caetera,'
he said; 'and by the way, as my uncle's illness appears to be serious,
the longer she is absent the