d 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 of millions more, with its caked outside of grime, and the inward
substance incessantly kicking the lid, prankish, but never casting it
off. A good stew, you perceive; not a parlous boiling. Weak as we may be
in our domestic cookery, our political has been sagaciously adjusted as
yet to catch the ardours of the furnace without being subject to their
volcanic activities.

That the social is also somewhat at fault, we have