some homely attractiveness, moved her to follow her own proposal for
the journey. Diana pleaded urgently, childishly in tone, to have Arthur
Rhodes with them, 'so as to be sure of a sympathetic companion for a
walk on the Downs.' At The Crossways, they were soon aware that Mr.
Redworth's domestics were in attendance to serve them. Manifestly the
house was his property, and not much of an investment! The principal
bed-room, her father's once, and her own, devoted now to Emma's use,
appalled her with a resemblance to her London room. She had noticed some
of her furniture at 'Dividend Manor,' and chosen to consider it in the
light of a bargain from a purchase at the sale of her goods. Here was
her bed, her writing-table, her chair of authorship, desks, books,
ornaments, water-colour sketches. And the drawing-room was fitted with
her brackets and etageres, holding every knickknack she had possessed
and scattered, small bronzes, antiques, ivory junks, quaint ivory
figures Chinese and Japanese, bits of porcelain, silver incense-urns,
dozens of dainty sundries. She had a shamed curiosity to spy for an
omission of one of them; all were there. The Crossways had been turned
into a trap.

Her reply to this blunt wooing, conspired, she felt justifled in
thinking, between him and Emma, was emphatic in muteness. She treated it
as if unobserved. At night, in bed, the scene of his mission from Emma
to her under this roof, barred her customary ascent to her planetary
kingdom. Next day she took Arthur after breakfast for a walk on the
Downs and remained absent till ten minutes before the hour of dinner.
As to that young gentleman, he was near to being caressed in public.
Arthur's opinions, his good sayings, were quoted; his excellent
companionship on really poetical walks, and perfect sympathy, praised to
his face. Challenged by her initiative to a kind of language that threw
Redworth out, he declaimed: 'We pace with some who make young morning
stale.'

'Oh! stale as peel of fruit long since consumed,' she chimed.

And go they proceeded; and they laughed, Emma smiled a little, Redworth
did the same beneath one of his questioning frowns--a sort of fatherly
grimace.

A suspicion that this man, when infatuated, was able to practise the
absurdest benevolence, the burlesque of chivalry, as a man-admiring sex
esteems it, stirred very naughty depths of the woman in Diana, labouring
under her perverted mood. She put him to proof, for the ch