‘In that event, the least I can offer is my whole life.’

‘We will not conjecture the event.’

‘The best I could hope for!’

’I see I shall have to revise the next edition of the young minister, and make an emotional curate of him.  Observe Danvers.  The woman is wretched; and now she sees me coming she pretends to be using her wits in studying the things about her, as I have directed.  She is a riddle.  I have the idea that any morning she may explode; and yet I trust her and sleep soundly.  I must be free, though I vex the world’s watchdogs.—­So, Danvers, you are noticing how thoroughly Frenchwomen do their work.’

Danvers replied with a slight mincing:  ’They may, ma’am; but they chatter chatter so.’

’The result proves that it is not a waste of energy.  They manage their fowls too.’

‘They’ve no such thing as mutton, ma’am.’

Dacier patriotically laughed.

‘She strikes the apology for wealthy and leisurely landlords,’ Diana said.

Danvers remarked that the poor fed meagrely in France.  She was not convinced of its being good for them by hearing that they could work on it sixteen hours out of the four and twenty.

Mr. Percy Dacier’s repast was furnished to him half an hour later.  At sunset Diana, taking Danvers beside her, walked with him to the line of the country road bearing on Caen.  The wind had sunk.  A large brown disk paused rayless on the western hills.

’A Dacier ought to feel at home in Normandy; and you may have sprung from this neighbourhood,’ said she, simply to chat.  ’Here the land is poorish, and a mile inland rich enough to bear repeated crops of colza, which tries the soil, I hear.  As for beauty, those blue hills you see, enfold charming valleys.  I meditate an expedition to Harcourt before I return.  An English professor of his native tongue at the Lycee at Caen told me on my way here that for twenty shillings a week you may live in royal ease round about Harcourt.  So we have our bed and board in prospect if fortune fails us, Danvers!

‘I would rather die in England, ma’am,’ was the maid’s reply.

Dacier set foot on his carriage-step.  He drew a long breath to say a short farewell, and he and Diana parted.

They parted as the plainest of sincere good friends, each at heart respecting the other for the repression of that which their hearts craved; any word of which might have carried them headlong, bound together on a Mazeppa-race, with scandal for the hounding wolves, and social ruin for the rocks and torrents.