Emma read Miss Paynham’s letter, and returned it with the comment:  ‘Utterly crazy.’  Tony said:  ’Is it not?  I am to “Pause before I trifle with a noble heart too long.”  She is to “have her happiness in the constant prayer for ours”; and she is “warned by one of those intimations never failing her, that he runs a serious danger.”  It reads like a Wizard’s Almanack.  And here “Homogeneity of sentiment the most perfect, is unable to contend with the fatal charm, which exercised by an indifferent person, must be ascribed to original predestination.”  She should be under the wing of Lady Wathin.  There is the mother for such chicks!  But I’ll own to you, Emmy, that after the perusal, I did ask myself a question as to my likeness of late to the writer.  I have drivelled . . .  I was shuddering over it when you came in.  I have sentimentalized up to thin smoke.  And she tells a truth when she says I am not to “count social cleverness”—­she means volubility—­” as a warrant for domineering a capacious intelligence”:  because of the gentleman’s modesty.  Agreed:  I have done it; I am contrite.  I am going into slavery to make amends for presumption.  Banality, thy name is marriage!’

‘Your business is to accept life as we have it,’ said Emma; and Tony shrugged.  She was precipitate in going forth to her commonplace fate, and scarcely looked at the man requested by Emma to escort her to her cottage.  After their departure, Emma fell into laughter at the last words with the kiss of her cheeks:  ‘Here goes old Ireland!’ But, from her look and from what she had said upstairs, Emma could believe that the singular sprite of girlishness invading and governing her latterly, had yielded place to the woman she loved.

CHAPTER XLIII

Nuptial chapter; and of how A barely Willing woman was led to bloom with the nuptial sentiment

Emma watched them on their way through the park, till they rounded the beechwood, talking, it could be surmised, of ordinary matters; the face of the gentleman turning at times to his companion’s, which steadily fronted the gale.  She left the ensuing to a prayer for their good direction, with a chuckle at Tony’s evident feeling of a ludicrous posture, and the desperate rush of her agile limbs to have it over.  But her prayer throbbed almost to a supplication that the wrong done to her beloved by Dacier—­the wound to her own sisterly pride rankling as an injury to her sex, might be cancelled through the union of the woman noble in the sight of God with a more manlike man.

Meanwhile the feet of the couple were going faster than their heads to the end of the journey.  Diana knew she would have to hoist the signal-and how?  The prospect was dumb-foundering.  She had to think of appeasing her Emma.  Redworth, for his part; actually supposed she had accepted his escorting in proof of the plain friendship offered him overnight.