‘I used to be her man of business,’ Redworth observed.

‘She speaks of your kind services.  This is mere matter for lawyers.’

‘She is recovering?’

’You may see her at Copsley next week.  You can come down on Wednesdays or Saturdays?’

‘Any day.  Tell her I want her opinion upon the state of things.’

‘It will please her; but you will have to describe the state of things.’

Emma feared she had said too much.  She tried candour again for concealment.  ’My poor Tony has been struck down low.  I suppose it is like losing a diseased limb:—­she has her freedom, at the cost of a blow to the system.’

‘She may be trusted for having strength,’ said Redworth.’

‘Yes.’  Emma’s mild monosyllable was presently followed by an exclamation:  ’One has to experience the irony of Fate to comprehend how cruel it is!’ Then she remembered that such language was peculiarly abhorrent to him.

‘Irony of Fate!’ he echoed her.  ’I thought you were above that literary jargon.’

’And I thought I was:  or thought it would be put in a dialect practically explicable,’ she answered, smiling at the lion roused.

‘Upon my word,’ he burst out, ’I should like to write a book of Fables, showing how donkeys get into grinding harness, and dogs lose their bones, and fools have their sconces cracked, and all run jabbering of the irony of Fate, to escape the annoyance of tracing the causes.  And what are they? nine times out of ten, plain want of patience, or some debt for indulgence.  There’s a subject:—­let some one write, Fables in illustration of the irony of Fate:  and I’ll undertake to tack-on my grandmother’s maxims for a moral to teach of ’em.  We prate of that irony when we slink away from the lesson—­the rod we conjure.  And you to talk of Fate!  It’s the seed we sow, individually or collectively.  I’m bound-up in the prosperity of the country, and if the ship is wrecked, it ruins my fortune, but not me, unless I’m bound-up in myself.  At least I hope that’s my case.’

He apologized for intruding Mr. Thomas Redworth.

His hearer looked at him, thinking he required a more finely pointed gift of speech for the ironical tongue, but relishing the tonic directness of his faculty of reason while she considered that the application of the phrase might be brought home to him so as to render ’my Grandmother’s moral’ a conclusion less comfortingly, if quite intelligibly, summary.  And then she thought of Tony’s piteous instance; and thinking with her heart, the tears insisted on that bitter irony of the heavens, which bestowed the long-withheld and coveted boon when it was empty of value or was but as a handful of spices to a shroud.

Perceiving the moisture in her look, Redworth understood that it was foolish to talk rationally.  But on her return to her beloved, the real quality of the man had overcome her opposing state of sentiment, and she spoke of him with an iteration and throb in the voice that set a singular query whirring round Diana’s ears.  Her senses were too heavy for a suspicion.