’I remember your words:  “Observation is the most, enduring of the pleasures of life”; and so I have found it,’ she said.  There was a brightness along her under-eyelids that caused him to look away.

The expected catastrophe occurred on the descent of a cutting in the sand, where their cordial postillion at a trot bumped the chariot against the sturdy wheels of a waggon, which sent it reclining for support upon a beech-tree’s huge intertwisted serpent roots, amid strips of brown bracken and pendant weeds, while he exhibited one short stump of leg, all boot, in air.  No one was hurt.  Diana disengaged herself from the shoulder of Danvers, and mildly said: 

‘That reminds me, I forgot to ask why we came in a chariot.’

Redworth was excited on her behalf, but the broken glass had done no damage, nor had Danvers fainted.  The remark was unintelligible to him, apart from the comforting it had been designed to give.  He jumped out, and held a hand for them to do the same.  ’I never foresaw an event more positively,’ said he.

‘And it was nothing but a back view that inspired you all the way,’ said Diana.

A waggoner held the horses, another assisted Redworth to right the chariot.  The postillion had hastily recovered possession of his official seat, that he might as soon as possible feel himself again where he was most intelligent, and was gay in stupidity, indifferent to what happened behind him.  Diana heard him counselling the waggoner as to the common sense of meeting small accidents with a cheerful soul.

‘Lord!’ he cried, ’I been pitched a Somerset in my time, and taken up for dead, and that didn’t beat me!’

Disasters of the present kind could hardly affect such a veteran.  But he was painfully disconcerted by Redworth’s determination not to entrust the ladies any farther to his guidance.  Danvers had implored for permission to walk the mile to the town, and thence take a fly to Copsley.  Her mistress rather sided with the postillion; who begged them to spare him the disgrace of riding in and delivering a box at the Red Lion.

‘What’ll they say?  And they know Arthur Dance well there,’ he groaned.  ‘What!  Arthur! chariotin’ a box!  And me a better man to his work now than I been for many a long season, fit for double the journey!  A bit of a shake always braces me up.  I could read a newspaper right off, small print and all.  Come along, sir, and hand the ladies in.’

Danvers vowed her thanks to Mr. Redworth for refusing.  They walked ahead; the postillion communicated his mixture of professional and human feelings to the waggoners, and walked his horses in the rear, meditating on the weak-heartedness of gentryfolk, and the means for escaping being chaffed out of his boots at the Old Red Lion, where he was to eat, drink, and sleep that night.  Ladies might be fearsome after a bit of a shake; he would not have supposed it of a gentleman.  He jogged himself into an arithmetic of the number of nips of liquor he had taken to soothe him on the road, in spite of the gentleman.  ’For some of ’em are sworn enemies of poor men, as yonder one, ne’er a doubt.’