performed that executive part! A wiser man would now have been the lord of it.
... So he felt, with his burning wish to protect and cherish the beloved woman,
while saying: »If we find a speedy bidder for The Crossways, you will have to
thank our railways.«
    »You!« said Diana, confident in his ability to do everything of the
practical kind.
    Her ingenuousness tickled him. He missed her comic touches upon men and
things, but the fever shown by her manner accounted for it.
    As soon as he left her, she was writing to the lover who had an hour
previously been hearing her voice; the note of her theme being Party; and how to
serve it, when to sacrifice it to the Country. She wrote, carolling bars of the
Puritani marches; and such will passion do, that her choice of music was quite
in harmony with her theme. The martially-amorous melodies of Italian Opera in
those days fostered a passion challenged to intrepidity from the heart of
softness; gilding at the same time, and putting warm blood even into dull
arithmetical figures which might be important to her lover, her hero fronting
battle. She condensed Redworth's information skilfully, heartily giving it and
whatever she had imbibed, as her own, down to the remark: »Common sense in
questions of justice, is a weapon that makes way into human heads and wins the
certain majority, if we strike with it incessantly.« Whether anything she wrote
was her own, mattered little: the savour of Percy's praise, which none could
share with her, made it instantly all her own. Besides she wrote to strengthen
him; she naturally laid her friends and the world under contribution; and no
other sort of writing was possible. Percy had not a common interest in fiction;
still less for high comedy. He liked the broad laugh when he deigned to open
books of that sort; puns and strong flavours and harlequin surprises; and her
work would not admit of them, however great her willingness to force her hand
for his amusement: consequently her inventiveness deadened. She had to cease
whipping it. »My poor old London cabhorse of a pen shall go to grass!« she
sighed, looking to the sale of The Crossways for money; looking no farther.
    Those marshalled battalions of Debit and Credit were in hostile order, the
weaker simply devoted to fighting for delay, when a winged messenger bearing the
form of old Mr. Braddock descended to her with the reconciling news that a
hermit bachelor, an acquaintance of Mr. Redworth