better, perhaps.'

'It would never do,' said Lady Esquart, understanding his drift
immediately. 'We winter in Rome. She will not abandon us--I have her
word for it. Next Easter we are in Paris; and so home, I suppose. There
will be no hurry before we are due at Cowes. We seem to have become
confirmed wanderers; for two of us at least it is likely to be our last
great tour.'

Dacier informed her that he had pledged his word to write to
Mrs. Warwick of his uncle's condition, and the several appointed
halting-places of the Esquarts between the lakes and Florence were named
to him. Thus all things were openly treated; all had an air of being
on the surface; the communications passing between Mrs. Warwick and the
Hon. Percy Dacier might have been perused by all the world. None but
that portion of it, sage in suspiciousness, which objects to such
communications under any circumstances, could have detected in their
correspondence a spark of coming fire or that there was common warmth.
She did not feel it, nor did he. The position of the two interdicted it
to a couple honourably sensible of social decencies; and who were, be it
added, kept apart. The blood is the treacherous element in the story
of the nobly civilized, of which secret Diana, a wife and no wife, a
prisoner in liberty, a blooming woman imagining herself restored to
transcendent maiden ecstacies--the highest youthful poetic--had received
some faint intimation when the blush flamed suddenly in her cheeks and
her heart knelled like the towers of a city given over to the devourer.
She had no wish to meet him again. Without telling herself why, she
would have shunned the meeting. Disturbers that thwarted her simple
happiness in sublime scenery were best avoided. She thought so the more
for a fitful blur to the simplicity of her sensations, and a task she
sometimes had in restoring and toning them, after that sweet morning
time in Rovio.

CHAPTER XVII. 'THE PRINCESS EGERIA'

London, say what we will of it, is after all the head of the British
giant, and if not the liveliest in bubbles, it is past competition the
largest broth-pot of brains anywhere simmering on the hob: over the
steadiest of furnaces too. And the oceans and the continents, as you
know, are perpetual and copious contributors, either to the heating
apparatus or to the contents of the pot. Let grander similes besought.
This one fits for the smoky receptacle cherishing millions, magnetic to
tens