‘Feature and colour!’ said Diana.  ’You have them here, and on a scale that one can embrace.  I should like to build a hut on this point, and wait for such a day to return.  It brings me to life.’  She lifted her eyelids on her friend’s worn sweet face, and knowing her this friend up to death, past it in her hopes, she said bravely, ’It is the Emma of days and scenes to me!  It helps me to forget myself, as I do when I think of you, dearest; but the subject has latterly been haunting me, I don’t know why, and ominously, as if my nature were about to horrify my soul.  But I am not sentimentalizing, you are really this day and scene in my heart.’

Emma smiled confidingly.  She spoke her reflection:  ’The heart must be troubled a little to have the thought.  The flower I gather here tells me that we may be happy in privation and suffering if simply we can accept beauty.  I won’t say expel the passions, but keep passion sober, a trotter in harness.’

Diana caressed the ponies’ heads with the droop of her whip:  ’I don’t think I know him!’ she said.

Between sincerity and a suspicion so cloaked and dull that she did not feel it to be the opposite of candour, she fancied she was passionless because she could accept the visible beauty, which was Emma’s prescription and test; and she forced herself to make much of it, cling to it, devour it; with envy of Emma’s contemplative happiness, through whose grave mind she tried to get to the peace in it, imagining that she succeeded.  The cloaked and dull suspicion weighed within her nevertheless.  She took it for a mania to speculate on herself.  There are states of the crimson blood when the keenest wits are childish, notably in great-hearted women aiming at the majesty of their sex and fearful of confounding it by the look direct and the downright word.  Yet her nature compelled her inwardly to phrase the sentence:  ’Emma is a wife!’ The character of her husband was not considered, nor was the meaning of the exclamation pursued.

They drove through the gorse into wild land of heath and flowering hawthorn, and along by tracts of yew and juniper to another point, jutting on a furzy sand-mound, rich with the mild splendour of English scenery, which Emma stamped on her friend’s mind by saying:  ’A cripple has little to envy in you who can fly when she has feasts like these at her doors.’

They had an inclination to boast on the drive home of the solitude they had enjoyed; and just then, as the road in the wood wound under great beeches, they beheld a London hat.  The hat was plucked from its head.  A clear-faced youth, rather flushed, dusty at the legs, addressed Diana.

‘Mr. Rhodes!’ she said, not discouragingly.

She was petitioned to excuse him; he thought she would wish to hear the news in town last night as early as possible; he hesitated and murmured it.

Diana turned to Emma:  ‘Lord Dannisburgh!’ her paleness told the rest.