the creature declines to be treated as merchandize. It seems I have
a faithful servant; very much like my life, not quite to my taste; the
one thing out of the wreck!--with my dog!'

Before quitting her house for the return to Copsley, she had to
grant Mr. Alexander Hepburn, post-haste from his Caledonia, a private
interview. She came out of it noticeably shattered. Nothing was related
to Emma, beyond the remark: 'I never knew till this morning the force
of No in earnest.' The weighty little word--woman's native watchdog and
guardian, if she calls it to her aid in earnest--had encountered
and withstood a fiery ancient host, astonished at its novel power of
resistance.

Emma contented herself with the result. 'Were you much supplicated?'

'An Operatic Fourth-Act,' said Diana, by no means; feeling so flippantly
as she spoke.

She received, while under the impression of this man's, honest, if
primitive, ardour of courtship, or effort to capture, a characteristic
letter from Westlake, choicely phrased, containing presumeably an
application for her hand, in the generous offer of his own. Her reply
to a pursuer of that sort was easy. Comedy, after the barbaric attack,
refreshed her wits and reliance on her natural fencing weapons. To
Westlake, the unwritten No was conveyed in a series of kindly ironic
subterfuges, that, played it like an impish flea across the pages, just
giving the bloom of the word; and rich smiles come to Emma's life in
reading the dexterous composition: which, however, proved so thoroughly
to Westlake's taste, that a second and a third exercise in the comedy of
the negative had to be despatched to him from Copsley.

CHAPTER XL. IN WHICH WE SEE NATURE MAKING OF A WOMAN A MAID AGAIN, AND
A THRICE WHIMSICAL. On their way from London, after leaving the station,
the drive through the valley led them past a field, where cricketers
were at work bowling and batting under a vertical sun: not a very
comprehensible sight to ladies, whose practical tendencies, as
observers of the other sex, incline them to question the gain of such an
expenditure of energy. The dispersal of the alphabet over a printed
page is not less perplexing to the illiterate. As soon as Emma Dunstane
discovered the Copsley head-gamekeeper at one wicket, and, actually,
Thomas Redworth facing him, bat in hand, she sat up, greatly interested.
Sir Lukin stopped the carriage at the gate, and reminded his wife that
it was the day of the yea