it, for
the encouragement of a husband in the observance of his duties. One of
the horses had fallen lame, so they went out for a walk, at Lady
Dunstane's request. It was a delicious afternoon of Spring, with the full
red disk of sun dropping behind the brown beech-twigs. She remembered
long afterward the sweet simpleness of her feelings as she took in the
scent of wild flowers along the lanes and entered the woods jaws of
another monstrous and blackening experience. He fell into the sentimental
vein, and a man coming from that heated London life to these glorified
woods, might be excused for doing so, though it sounded to her just a
little ludicrous in him. She played tolerantly second to it; she quoted a
snatch of poetry, and his whole face was bent to her, with the petition
that she would repeat the verse. Much struck was this giant ex-dragoon.
Ah! how fine! grand! He would rather hear that than any opera: it was
diviner! 'Yes, the best poetry is,' she assented. 'On your lips,' he
said. She laughed. 'I am not a particularly melodious reciter.' He vowed
he could listen to her eternally, eternally. His face, on a screw of the
neck and shoulders, was now perpetually three-quarters fronting. Ah! she
was going to leave. 'Yes, and you will find my return quite early
enough,' said Diana, stepping a trifle more briskly. His fist was raised
on the length of the arm, as if in invocation. 'Not in the whole of
London is there a woman worthy to fasten your shoe-buckles! My oath on
it! I look; I can't spy one.' Such was his flattering eloquence.

She told him not to think it necessary to pay her compliments. 'And here,
of all places!' They were in the heart of the woods. She found her hand
seized--her waist. Even then, so impossible is it to conceive the
unimaginable even when the apparition of it smites us, she expected some
protesting absurdity, or that he had seen something in her path.--What
did she hear? And from her friend's husband!

If stricken idiotic, he was a gentleman; the tigress she had detected in
her composition did not require to be called forth; half-a-dozen words,
direct, sharp as fangs and teeth, with the eyes burning over them,
sufficed for the work of defence. 'The man who swore loyalty to Emma!'
Her reproachful repulsion of eyes was unmistakeable, withering; as
masterful as a superior force on his muscles.--What thing had he been
taking her for?--She asked it within: and he of himself, in a reflective
gasp