be excused for doing so, though it sounded to her just a little ludicrous in him.  She played tolerantly second to it; she quoted a snatch of poetry, and his whole face was bent to her, with the petition that she would repeat the verse.  Much struck was this giant ex-dragoon.  Ah! how fine! grand!  He would rather hear that than any opera:  it was diviner!  ‘Yes, the best poetry is,’ she assented.  ’On your lips,’ he said.  She laughed.  ’I am not a particularly melodious reciter.’  He vowed he could listen to her eternally, eternally.  His face, on a screw of the neck and shoulders, was now perpetually three-quarters fronting.  Ah! she was going to leave.  ’Yes, and you will find my return quite early enough,’ said Diana, stepping a trifle more briskly.  His fist was raised on the length of the arm, as if in invocation.  ’Not in the whole of London is there a woman worthy to fasten your shoe-buckles!  My oath on it!  I look; I can’t spy one.’  Such was his flattering eloquence.

She told him not to think it necessary to pay her compliments.  ’And here, of all places!’ They were in the heart of the woods.  She found her hand seized—­her waist.  Even then, so impossible is it to conceive the unimaginable even when the apparition of it smites us, she expected some protesting absurdity, or that he had seen something in her path.—­ What did she hear?  And from her friend’s husband!

If stricken idiotic, he was a gentleman; the tigress she had detected in her composition did not require to be called forth; half-a-dozen words, direct, sharp as fangs and teeth, with the eyes burning over them, sufficed for the work of defence.  ‘The man who swore loyalty to Emma!’ Her reproachful repulsion of eyes was unmistakeable, withering; as masterful as a superior force on his muscles.—­What thing had he been taking her for?—­She asked it within:  and he of himself, in a reflective gasp.  Those eyes of hers appeared as in a cloud, with the wrath above:  she had:  the look of a Goddess in anger.  He stammered, pleaded across her flying shoulder—­Oh! horrible, loathsome, pitiable to hear! . . .  ’A momentary aberration . . . her beauty . . . he deserved to be shot! . . . could not help admiring . . . quite lost his head . . on his honour! never again !’

Once in the roadway, and Copsley visible, she checked her arrowy pace for breath, and almost commiserated the dejected wretch in her thankfulness to him for silence.  Nothing exonerated him, but at least he had the grace not to beg secresy.  That would have been an intolerable whine of a poltroon, adding to her humiliation.  He abstained; he stood at her mercy without appealing.