I could almost say, to feel the
tremble of the air-forerunner of imperative changes.'

Dacier brightened fondly. 'You positively describe him; paint him to the
life, without knowing him!'

'I have seen him; and if I paint, whose are the colours?'

'Sometimes I repeat you to him, and I get all the credit,' said Dacier.

'I glow with pride to think of speaking anything that you repeat,' said
Diana, and her eyes were proudly lustreful.

Their love was nourished on these mutual flatteries. Thin food for
passion! The innocence of it sanctioned the meetings and the appointments
to meet. When separated they were interchanging letters, formally worded
in the apostrophe and the termination, but throbbingly full: or Diana
thought so of Percy's letters, with grateful justice; for his manner of
opening his heart in amatory correspondence was to confide important,
secret matters, up to which mark she sprang to reply in counsel. He
proved his affection by trusting her; his respect by his tempered style:
'A Greenland style of writing,' she had said of an unhappy gentleman's
epistolary compositions resembling it; and now the same official baldness
was to her mind Italianly rich; it called forth such volumes.

Flatteries that were thin food for passion appeared the simplest
exchanges of courtesy, and her meetings with her lover, judging by the
nature of the discourse they held, so, consequent to their joint interest
in the great crisis anticipated, as to rouse her indignant surprise and a
turn for downright rebellion when the Argus world signified the fact of
its having one eye, or more, wide open.

Debit and Credit, too, her buzzing familiars, insisted on an audience at
each ear, and at the house-door, on her return to London.

CHAPTER XXIX

SHOWS THE APPROACHES OF THE POLITICAL AND THE DOMESTIC CRISIS IN COMPANY

There was not much talk of Diana between Lady Dunstane and her customary
visitor Tom Redworth now. She was shy in speaking of the love-stricken
woman, and more was in his mind for thought than for speech. She some
times wondered how much he might know, ending with the reflection that
little passing around was unknown to him. He had to shut his mind against
thought, against all meditation upon Mrs. Warwick; it was based
scientifically when speculating and calculating, on the material
element--a talisman. Men and women crossing the high seas of life he had
found most readable under that illuminating inquiry, as