f 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 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 wor