'Accepted, if I may see her.'

'Honestly accepted?'

'Imposed fatally, I have to own. I have felt with you: you are the
wiser. But, admitting that, surely we can meet. I may see you?'

'My house has not been shut.'

'I respected the house. I distrusted myself.'

'What restores your confidence?'

'The strength I draw from you.'

One of the Beauties at a garden-party is lucky to get as many minutes as
had passed in quietness. Diana was met and captured. But those last
words of Percy's renewed her pride in him by suddenly building a firm
faith in herself. Noblest of lovers! she thought, and brooded on the
little that had been spoken, the much conveyed, for a proof of perfect
truthfulness.

The world had watched them. It pronounced them discreet if culpable;
probably cold to the passion both. Of Dacier's coldness it had no doubt,
and Diana's was presumed from her comical flights of speech. She was
given to him because of the known failure of her other adorers. He in
the front rank of politicians attracted her with the lustre of his
ambition; she him with her mingling of talent and beauty. An astute
world; right in the main, owing to perceptions based upon brute nature;
utterly astray in particulars, for the reason that it takes no count of