cripple
has little to envy in you who can fly when she has feasts like these at
her doors.'

They had an inclination to boast on the drive home of the solitude they
had enjoyed; and just then, as the road in the wood wound under great
beeches, they beheld a London hat. The hat was plucked from its head. A
clear-faced youth, rather flushed, dusty at the legs, addressed Diana.

'Mr. Rhodes!' she said, not discouragingly.

She was petitioned to excuse him; he thought she would wish to hear the
news in town last night as early as possible; he hesitated and murmured
it.

Diana turned to Emma: 'Lord Dannisburgh!' her paleness told the rest.

Hearing from Mr. Rhodes that he had walked the distance from town, and
had been to Copsley, Lady Dunstane invited him to follow the
pony-carriage thither, where he was fed and refreshed by a tea-breakfast,
as he preferred walking on tea, he said. 'I took the liberty to call at
Mrs. Warwick's house,' he informed her; 'the footman said she was at
Copsley. I found it on the map--I knew the directions--and started about
two in the morning. I wanted a walk.'

It was evident to her that he was one of the young squires bewitched whom
beautiful women are constantly enlisting. There was no concealment of it,
though he stirred a sad enviousness in the invalid lady by descanting on
the raptures of a walk out of London in the youngest light of day, and on
the common objects he had noticed along the roadside, and through the
woods, more sustaining, closer with nature than her compulsory feeding on
the cream of things.

'You are not fatigued?' she inquired, hoping for that confession at
least; but she pardoned his boyish vaunting to walk the distance back
without any fatigue at all.

He had a sweeter reward for his pains; and if the business of the
chronicler allowed him to become attached to pure throbbing felicity
wherever it is encountered, he might be diverted by the blissful
unexpectedness of good fortune befalling Mr. Arthur Rhodes in having the
honour to conduct Mrs. Warwick to town. No imagined happiness, even in
the heart of a young man of two and twenty, could have matched it. He was
by her side, hearing and seeing her, not less than four hours. To add to
his happiness, Lady Dunstane said she would be glad to welcome him again.
She thought him a pleasant specimen of the self-vowed squire.

Diana was sure that there would be a communication for her of some sort
at her house in Lond