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 her to conceal her dislike of the place in love:  cat’s love, she owned.  Here, she confessed to Diana, she would wish to live to her end.  It seemed remote, where an invigorating upper air gave new bloom to her cheeks; but she kept one secret from her friend.

Copsley was an estate of nearly twelve hundred acres, extending across the ridge of the hills to the slopes North and South.  Seven counties rolled their backs under this commanding height, and it would have tasked a pigeon to fly within an hour the stretch of country visible at the Copsley windows.  Sunrise to right, sunset leftward, the borders of the grounds held both flaming horizons.  So much of the heavens and of earth is rarely granted to a dwelling.