That was the warehouse for Mrs. Warwick’s tea.  They conversed of Teas; the black, the green, the mixtures; each thinking of the attack to come, and the defence.  Meantime, the cut bread and butter having flown, Redwerth attacked the loaf.  He apologized.

‘Oh! pay me a practical compliment,’ Diana said, and looked really happy at his unfeigned relish of her simple fare.

She had given him one opportunity in speaking of her maid’s love of native country.  But it came too early.

‘They say that bread and butter is fattening,’ he remarked.

‘You preserve the mean,’ said she.

He admitted that his health was good.  For some little time, to his vexation at the absurdity, she kept him talking of himself.  So flowing was she, and so sweet the motion of her mouth in utterance, that he followed her lead, and he said odd things and corrected them.  He had to describe his ride to her.

‘Yes! the view of the Downs from Dewhurst,’ she exclaimed.  ’Or any point along the ridge.  Emma and I once drove there in Summer, with clotted cream from her dairy, and we bought fresh-plucked wortleberries, and stewed them in a hollow of the furzes, and ate them with ground biscuits and the clotted cream iced, and thought it a luncheon for seraphs.  Then you dropped to the road round under the sand-heights—­and meditated railways!’

‘Just a notion or two.’

‘You have been very successful in America?’

’Successful; perhaps; we exclude extremes in our calculations of the still problematical.’

‘I am sure,’ said she, ‘you always have faith in your calculations.’

Her innocent archness dealt him a stab sharper than any he had known since the day of his hearing of her engagement.  He muttered of his calculations being human; he was as much of a fool as other men—­more!

‘Oh! no,’ said she.

‘Positively.’

‘I cannot think it.’

‘I know it.’

‘Mr. Redworth, you will never persuade me to believe it.’

He knocked a rising groan on the head, and rejoined ’I hope I may not have to say so to-night.’

Diana felt the edge of the dart.  ’And meditating railways, you scored our poor land of herds and flocks; and night fell, and the moon sprang up, and on you came.  It was clever of you to find your way by the moonbeams.’

‘That’s about the one thing I seem fit for!’

’But what delusion is this, in the mind of a man succeeding in everything he does!’ cried Diana, curious despite her wariness.  ’Is there to be the revelation of a hairshirt ultimately?—­a Journal of Confessions?  You succeeded in everything you aimed at, and broke your heart over one chance miss?’

‘My heart is not of the stuff to break,’ he said, and laughed off her fortuitous thrust straight into it.  ‘Another cup, yes.  I came . . .’

‘By night,’ said she, ’and cleverly found your way, and dined at The Three Ravens, and walked to The Crossways, and met no ghosts.’