at her
eyelids attendant on any idea of her loving. The woman who talked of
the sentimentalist's 'fiddling harmonics,' herself stressed the material
chords, in her attempt to escape out of herself and away from her
pursuer.

Meanwhile she was as little conscious of what she was doing as of
how she appeared. Arthur went about with the moony air of surcharged
sweetness, and a speculation on it, alternately tiptoe and prostrate.
More of her intoxicating wine was administered to him, in utter
thoughtlessness of consequences to one who was but a boy and a friend,
almost of her own rearing. She told Emma, when leaving The Crossways,
that she had no desire to look on the place again: she wondered at Mr.
Redworth's liking such a solitude. In truth, the look back on it let her
perceive that her husband haunted it, and disfigured the man, of real
generosity, as her heart confessed, but whom she accused of a lack of
prescient delicacy, for not knowing she would and must be haunted
there. Blaming him, her fountain of colour shot up, at a murmur of her
unjustness and the poor man's hopes.

A week later, the youth she publicly named 'her Arthur' came down to
Copsley with news of his having been recommended by Mr. Redworth for the
post of secretary to an old Whig nobleman famous for his patronage of
men of letters. And besides, he expected to inherit, he said, and gazed
in a way to sharpen her instincts. The wine he had drunk of late from
her flowing vintage was in his eyes. They were on their usual rambles
out along the heights. 'Accept, by all means, and thank Mr. Redworth,'
said she, speeding her tongue to intercept him. 'Literature is a good
stick and a bad horse. Indeed, I ought to know. You can always write; I
hope you will.'

She stepped fast, hearing: 'Mrs. Warwick--Diana! May I take your hand?'

This was her pretty piece of work! 'Why should you? If you speak my
Christian name, no: you forfeit any pretext. And pray, don't loiter.
We are going at the pace of the firm of Potter and Dawdle, and you
know they never got their shutters down till it was time to put them up
again.'

Nimble-footed as she was, she pressed ahead too fleetly for amorous
eloquence to have a chance. She heard 'Diana!' twice, through the
rattling of her discourse and flapping of her dress.

'Christian names are coin that seem to have an indifferent valuation of
the property they claim,' she said in the Copsley garden; 'and as for
hands, at meeting