tiplied itself, touching at the
same moment the heavens and Diana's heart-at least, drawing them together;
for she felt exalted, enraptured, as proud of her countrymen as of their
hero.

'That's the natural shamrock, after the artificial!' she heard Mr.
Redworth say, behind her.

She turned and sent one of her brilliant glances flying over him, in
gratitude for a timely word well said. And she never forgot the remark,
nor he the look.

CHAPTER IV

CONTAINING HINTS OF DIANA'S EXPERIENCES AND OF WHAT THEY LED TO

A fortnight after this memorable Ball the principal actors of both sexes
had crossed the Channel back to England, and old Ireland was left to her
rains from above and her undrained bogs below; her physical and her
mental vapours; her ailments and her bog-bred doctors; as to whom the
governing country trusted they would be silent or discourse humorously.

The residence of Sir Lukin Dunstane, in the county of Surrey, inherited
by him during his recent term of Indian services, was on the hills, where
a day of Italian sky, or better, a day of our breezy South-west, washed
from the showery night, gives distantly a tower to view, and a murky web,
not without colour: the ever-flying banner of the metropolis, the smoke
of the city's chimneys, if you prefer plain language. At a first
inspection of the house, Lady Dunstane did not like it, and it was
advertized to be let, and the auctioneer proclaimed it in his dialect.
Her taste was delicate; she had the sensitiveness of an invalid: twice
she read the stalking advertizement of the attractions of Copsley, and
hearing Diana call it 'the plush of speech,' she shuddered; she decided
that a place where her husband's family had lived ought not to stand
forth meretriciously spangled and daubed, like a show-booth at a fair,
for a bait; though the grandiloquent man of advertizing letters assured
Sir Lukin that a public agape for the big and gaudy mouthful is in no
milder way to be caught; as it is apparently the case. She withdrew the
trumpeting placard. Retract we likewise 'banner of the metropolis.' That
plush of speech haunts all efforts to swell and illuminate citizen prose
to a princely poetic.

Yet Lady Dunstane herself could name the bank of smoke, when looking
North-eastward from her summerhouse, the flag of London: and she was a
person of the critical mind, well able to distinguish between the simple
metaphor and the superobese. A year of habitation induced