The vague letters were excellently well composed:  she was going abroad, and knew not when she would return; bade her friends think the best they could of her in the meantime.  Whitmonby was favoured with an anecdote, to be read as an apologue by the light of subsequent events.  But the letter to Emma tasked Diana.  Intending to write fully, her pen committed the briefest sentences:  the tenderness she felt for Emma wakening her heart to sing that she was loved, loved, and knew love at last; and Emma’s foreseen antagonism to the love and the step it involved rendered her pleadings in exculpation a stammered confession of guiltiness, ignominious, unworthy of the pride she felt in her lover.  ’I am like a cartridge rammed into a gun, to be discharged at a certain hour tomorrow,’ she wrote; and she sealed a letter so frigid that she could not decide to post it.  All day she imagined hearing a distant cannonade.  The light of the day following was not like earthly light.  Danvers assured her there was no fog in London.

’London is insupportable; I am going to Paris, and shall send for you in a week or two,’ said Diana.

‘Allow me to say, ma’am, that you had better take me with you,’ said Danvers.

‘Are you afraid of travelling by yourself, you foolish creature?’

’No, ma’am, but I don’t like any hands to undress and dress my mistress but my own.’

‘I have not lost the art,’ said Diana, chafing for a magic spell to extinguish the woman, to whom, immediately pitying her, she said:  ’You are a good faithful soul.  I think you have never kissed me.  Kiss me on the forehead.’

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!’