d
a gratification in seeing how little this affected her perfect
naturalness.

'You are often in the world--dinners, dances?' she said.

'People are kind.'

'Any proposals?'

'Nibbles.'

'Quite heart-free?'

'Absolutely.'

Diana's unshadowed bright face defied all menace of an eclipse.

The block of sturdy gazers began to melt. The General had dispersed
his group of satellites by a movement with the Mayoress on his arm,
construed as the signal for procession to the supper-table.

CHAPTER III. THE INTERIOR OF MR. REDWORTH, AND THE EXTERIOR OF MR.
SULLIVAN SMITH

'It may be as well to take Mr. Redworth's arm; you will escape the crush
for you,' said Lady Dunstane to Diana. 'I don't sup. Yes! go! You must
eat, and he is handiest to conduct you.'

Diana thought of her chaperon and the lateness of the hour. She
murmured, to soften her conscience, 'Poor Mrs. Pettigrew!'

And once more Mr. Redworth, outwardly imperturbable, was in the
maelstrom of a happiness resembling tempest. He talked, and knew not
what he uttered. To give this matchless girl the best to eat and drink
was his business, and he performed it. Oddly, for a man who had no
loaded design, marshalling the troops in his active and capacious
cranium, he fell upon calculations of his income, present and
prospective, while she sat at the table and he stood behind her. Others
were wrangling for places, chairs, plates, glasses, game-pie, champagne:
she had them; the lady under his charge to a certainty would have them;
so far good; and he had seven hundred pounds per annum--seven hundred
and fifty, in a favourable aspect, at a stretch....

'Yes, the pleasantest thing to me after working all day is an opera
of Carini's,' she said, in full accord with her taste, 'and Tellio for
tenor, certainly.'--A fair enough sum for a bachelor: four hundred
personal income, and a prospect of higher dividends to increase it;
three hundred odd from his office, and no immediate prospects of an
increase there; no one died there, no elderly martyr for the advancement
of his juniors could be persuaded to die; they were too tough to think
of retiring. Say, seven hundred and fifty.... eight hundred, if the
commerce of the country fortified the Bank his property was embarked in;
or eight-fifty or nine ten....

'I could call him my poet also,' Mr. Redworth agreed with her taste in
poets. 'His letters are among the best ever written--or ever published:
the raciest Englis