Diana promised, with a glitter in her eyes. “You have my word, Mamma. I’ll take a name that no dirt can soil because it’s so black already. Fenton. I’ll be Mrs. Fenton. And for Christian name—O, my mamma, lend me yours that I may have one thing at least clean about me where I go. Let me be Lavinia because ’tis your name. Lavinia Fenton! And if I make my fortune you’ll come to me, and we’ll have rooms where that horror can’t pursue us, and some happy day to come, you’ll bless your Lavinia Fenton!” So her heart softened when she saw her mother’s grief, and it well became her. The two passed the evening together talking and weeping, clasping each other’s hand, and trembling each in her own way at the coming dawn and its events. They slept in each other’s arms also, if sleep it could be called, with Diana huddling against her mother like a young bird that quakes to leave the nest maternal, yet knows her wings are fledged. And such indeed was her pitiful case. So she saw the morning dawn wet and dismal behind the curtains, and clung the faster to her one refuge. CHAPTER IV “THE fair widow,” as my Lord Baltimore had complimented her, the Lady Fanny Armine, sat next morning in _negligée_ in her fine boudoir in Pall Mall, surrounded by all the fashionable frippery of the finest of fine ladies whose gold is as bright as her eyes. Porcelains from Nankin, china gods and monkeys of equal grinning ugliness, chessmen from India in cherry and white ivory, adorned the costly Japan cabinets. Toys from the ends of the earth to please my Lady Fanny—and ’tis to be thought they failed to please her for she never looked their way, but writ and writ, heedless also of the letters and billets that strewed the carpet about her. For this lady might have said with the fair Millamant— “O ay,—letters. I am persecuted with letters. One has ’em one does not know why. They serve to pin up one’s hair.” Indeed she put them to little nobler use than this, or the voider beside her desk. Love-letters, you perceive! But ’twas no love-letter she writ now, but one to a lady she loved—that never failed her in trouble or pleasure. In fine, a most unfeminine friend and cousin, in that she could be trusted with a secret, could give impartial counsel, and never grumble when ’twas not heeded, nor say “I told you so,”—when the inevitable result followed. In short an Irish pearl—her cousin Lady Desmond. But hear the letter. ’Tis revealing.