‘But will he?  He appears too despondent for a header.’

‘We cannot dance on a quaking floor.’

’No; it ’s exactly that quake of the floor which gives “much qualms,” to me as well,’ said Dacier.

‘A treble Neptune’s power!’ she rejoined, for his particular delectation.  ’Enough if he hesitates.  I forgive him his nausea.  He awaits the impetus, and it will reach him, and soon.  He will not wait for the mob at his heels, I am certain.  A Minister who does that, is a post, and goes down with the first bursting of the dam.  He has tried compromise and discovered that it does not appease the Fates; is not even a makeshift-mending at this hour.  He is a man of nerves, very sensitively built; as quick—­quicker than a woman, 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