At the word "Mezzo," a gentle, but involuntary laugh escaped from Lady Dora. Tremenhere was grave. He despised while he played with this girl; and, turning to the other, asked in a tone almost too serious and feeling for the occasion, "What is your thought?"
"I think Diana was an arrant, heartless flirt, and certainly deceitful. She assumed to herself a character not deserved—a strictly chaste goddess would never have come down o' night to embrace a shepherd on a hill. I think it is very fortunate he did sleep; had he awakened, he would have had a very different opinion of the lady, and have been fully justified in nodding significantly when her name was mentioned. I only wonder she should have told of herself; for unless she did so—how was this midnight visit known?"
"Oh! she perhaps wanted the cleverness which some possess, of keeping her own counsel," answered Tremenhere.
"Most probably," hazarded Lady Dora, not liking to keep too painful a silence where the subject had become so strangely epigrammatic, "some star betrayed her mistress."
"True!" replied Tremenhere, "as in 'Love's Witnesses,'" and he repeated in a soft, impressive voice—
"Love! when we last night, embracing,
Sigh'd farewell—who saw us part?
Was it night? or sly Aurora?
Or the stars? or the moon who heard?"
"A star shot down and told the ocean—
Ocean told a mariner;
Then the mariner told his mistress;
She—she told it every where!"
"'Gad, that's how Madam Diana's escapade became known, I bet my life!" cried Lord Randolph.
She did not reply; she was dreaming over the tone in which "Love! when we last night, embracing," had dropped from his lips, and was lost in that tone's significance, which sent up the harmony to her eyes, with which her softened glance lit on Tremenhere's; and then faded into shade beneath her trembling lashes, consumed, Phœnix-like, by its own fire.
"Then Diana was cruel, too," continued Lord Randolph, hunting down the huntress. "Unsparing with her darts; the wound from which, like wound of hart, never heals!"