Danvers put her lips to her mistress’s forehead, and was asked:  ’You still consider yourself attached to my fortunes?’

’I do, ma’am, at home or abroad; and if you will take me with you . . ’

‘Not for a week or so.’

‘I shall not be in the way, ma’am.’

They played at shutting eyes.  The petition of Danvers was declined; which taught her the more; and she was emboldened to say:  ’Wherever my mistress goes, she ought to have her attendant with her.’  There was no answer to it but the refusal.

The hours crumbled slowly, each with a blow at the passages of retreat.  Diana thought of herself as another person, whom she observed, not counselling her, because it was a creature visibly pushed by the Fates.  In her own mind she could not perceive a stone of solidity anywhere, nor a face that had the appearance of our common life.  She heard the cannon at intervals.  The things she said set Danvers laughing, and she wondered at the woman’s mingled mirth and stiffness.  Five o’clock struck.  Her letters were sent to the post.  Her boxes were piled from stairs to door.  She read the labels, for her good-bye to the hated name of Warwick:—­why ever adopted!  Emma might well have questioned why!  Women are guilty of such unreasoning acts!  But this was the close to that chapter.  The hour of six went by.  Between six and seven came a sound of knocker and bell at the street-door.  Danvers rushed into the sitting-room to announce that it was Mr. Redworth.  Before a word could be mustered, Redworth was in the room.  He said:  ‘You must come with me at once!’

CHAPTER XXVI

IN WHICH A DISAPPOINTED LOVER RECEIVES A MULTITUDE OF LESSONS

Dacier welted at the station, a good figure of a sentinel over his luggage and a spy for one among the inpouring passengers.  Tickets had been confidently taken, the private division of the carriages happily secured.  On board the boat she would be veiled.  Landed on French soil, they threw off disguises, breasted the facts.  And those?  They lightened.  He smarted with his eagerness.

He had come well in advance of the appointed time, for he would not have had her hang about there one minute alone.

Strange as this adventure was to a man of prominent station before the world, and electrical as the turning-point of a destiny that he was given to weigh deliberately and far-sightedly, Diana’s image strung him to the pitch of it.  He looked nowhere but ahead, like an archer putting hand for his arrow.