hange of
wind. It came, after wettings of a couple scorning the refuge of dainty
townsfolk under umbrellas, and proud of their likeness to dripping
wayside wildflowers. Arthur stayed at Copsley for a week of the crisp
North-easter; and what was it, when he had taken his leave, that brought
Tony home from her solitary walk in dejection? It could not be her
seriously regretting the absence of the youthful companion she had
parted with gaily, appointing a time for another meeting on the heights,
and recommending him to repair idle hours with strenuous work. The fit
passed and was not explained. The winds are sharp with memory. The hard
shrill wind crowed to her senses of an hour on the bleak sands of the
French coast; the beginning of the curtained misery, inscribed as her
happiness. She was next day prepared for her term in London with Emma,
who promised her to make an expedition at the end of it by way of
holiday, to see The Crossways, which Mr. Redworth said was not tenanted.

'You won't go through it like a captive?' said Emma.

'I don't like it, dear,' Diana put up a comic mouth. 'The debts we owe
ourselves are the hardest to pay. That is the discovery of advancing
age: and I used to imagine it was quite the other way. But they are the
debts of honour, imperative. I shall go through it grandly, you will
see. If I am stopped at my first recreancy and turned directly the
contrary way, I think I have courage.'

'You will not fear to meet... any one?' said Emma.

'The world and all it contains! I am robust, eager for the fray, an
Amazon, a brazen-faced hussy. Fear and I have parted. I shall not do you
discredit. Besides you intend to have me back here with you? And besides
again, I burn to make a last brave appearance. I have not outraged the
world, dear Emmy, whatever certain creatures in it may fancy.'

She had come out of her dejectedness with a shrewder view of Dacier;
equally painful, for it killed her romance, and changed the garden of
their companionship in imagination to a waste. Her clearing intellect
prompted it, whilst her nature protested, and reviled her to uplift him.
He had loved her. 'I shall die knowing that a man did love me once,' she
said to her widowed heart, and set herself blushing and blanching. But
the thought grew inveterate: 'He could not bear much.' And in her quick
brain it shot up a crop of similitudes for the quality of that man's
love. She shuddered, as at a swift cleaving of cold steel