Round to the front of the house at a trot, he stood in moonlight.  Then, for involuntarily he now did everything running, with a dash up the steps he seized the sullen pendant bell-handle, and worked it pumpwise, till he perceived a smaller bell-knob beside the door, at which he worked piston-wise.  Pump and piston, the hurly-burly and the tinkler created an alarm to scare cat and mouse and Cardinal spider, all that run or weave in desolate houses, with the good result of a certain degree of heat to his frame.  He ceased, panting.  No stir within, nor light.  That white stare of windows at the moon was undisturbed.

The Downs were like a wavy robe of shadowy grey silk.  No wonder that she had loved to look on them!

And it was no wonder that Andrew Hedger enjoyed prime bacon.  Bacon frizzling, fat rashers of real homefed on the fire-none of your foreign-suggested a genial refreshment and resistance to antagonistic elements.  Nor was it, granting health, granting a sharp night—­the temperature at least fifteen below zero—­an excessive boast for a man to say he could go on eating for a solid hour.

These were notions darting through a half nourished gentleman nipped in the frame by a severely frosty night.  Truly a most beautiful night!  She would have delighted to see it here.  The Downs were like floating islands, like fairy-laden vapours; solid, as Andrew Hedger’s hour of eating; visionary, as too often his desire!

Redworth muttered to himself, after taking the picture of the house and surrounding country from the sward, that he thought it about the sharpest night he had ever encountered in England.  He was cold, hungry, dispirited, and astoundingly stricken with an incapacity to separate any of his thoughts from old Andrew Hedger.  Nature was at her pranks upon him.

He left the garden briskly, as to the legs, and reluctantly.  He would have liked to know whether Diana had recently visited the house, or was expected.  It could be learnt in the morning; but his mission was urgent and he on the wings of it.  He was vexed and saddened.

Scarcely had he closed the garden-gate when the noise of an opening window arrested him, and he called.  The answer was in a feminine voice, youngish, not disagreeable, though not Diana’s.

He heard none of the words, but rejoined in a bawl:  ’Mrs. Warwick!—­Mr. Redworth!’

That was loud enough for the deaf or the dead.

The window closed.  He went to the door and waited.  It swung wide to him; and O marvel of a woman’s divination of a woman! there stood Diana.

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