But when Diana turned away to her dressing-room she saw before her a gallant figure with his sword by his side. At first in the flickering candlelight she knew not the gentleman and ’twas Miss Polly greeted him all sparkling smiles and delight, the glow of the applauding house still upon her. My Lord Baltimore stepped forward, bowing low, and instantly Polly vanished and Diana, cold and haughty as when the huntsman surprised her in her forest pool, stood before him. She said not a word and made as though to pass to her dressing-room. “Madam, I am come for the answer to all my words writ and spoken. Give me but a tithe of the courtesy you bestow on the public and at least deign a reply. If I am not odious in your eyes, pity the madness that has reduced me to this plea. I love you. Does this avowal excite no generous emotion?” They stood in the angle of the wall, and the players were still engaged behind the dropt curtain with their friends who swarmed upon the stage to rejoice with them. How far was his Lordship sincere? Diana might ask herself this, but ’twas more than he himself could answer! He writhed in a flame of desire but the mask of his composure hid it, and ’tis well known that desire and the heart need have little in common unless it be rooted in a love native to all the higher and nobler sensibilities. No woman had ever yet flouted him. A passion of anger and incredulity that it now could be, fanned the flame of desire and made it dangerous. Reason was routed, honour—for he knew himself bound in honour to another—vanquished. My Lady Fanny had been within his sight all that evening, beautiful and glittering. He had seen her blue eyes turn his way and hastily averted—those bright audacious eyes that never dropt before another. But the magic of her presence was evaporated. He saw her and marvelled that she had swept him away into an emotion he was now incapable of feeling. Diana stood before him, and to hold that proud but shy beauty in his arms, to know it his and his only, to have those lips against his own, that velvet cheek pressed to his, and more than all this, to know himself the conqueror where he had been disdained,—there was nothing in heaven nor earth that he would not have given at that moment to bend her to his will, and none the less because her bright graces had made her this night the idol of the only world he valued. Her possession would exalt him beyond all former successes. Not a man but would envy him,—not a tongue but would tell his triumph. He prest nearer to her.