In the fields he was genially helpful; commending them to the study of the South-west wind, if they wanted to forecast the weather and understand the climate of our country.  ’We have no Seasons, or only a shuffle of them.  Old calendars give seven months of the year to the Southwest, and that’s about the average.  Count on it, you may generally reckon what to expect.  When you don’t have the excess for a year or two, you are drenched the year following.’  He knew every bird by its flight and its pipe, habits, tricks, hints of sagacity homely with the original human; and his remarks on the sensitive life of trees and herbs were a spell to his thirsty hearers.  Something of astronomy he knew; but in relation to that science, he sank his voice, touchingly to Diana, who felt drawn to kinship with him when he had a pupil’s tone.  An allusion by Arthur to the poetical work of Aratus, led to a memorably pleasant evening’s discourse upon the long reading of the stars by these our mortal eyes.  Altogether the mind of the practical man became distinguishable to them as that of a plain brother of the poetic.  Diana said of him to Arthur:  ’He does not supply me with similes; he points to the source of them.’  Arthur, with envy of the man of positive knowledge, disguised an unstrung heart in agreeing.

Redworth alluded passingly to the condition of public affairs.  Neither of them replied.  Diana was wondering how one who perused the eternal of nature should lend a thought to the dusty temporary of the world.  Subsequently she reflected that she was asking him to confine his great male appetite to the nibble of bread which nourished her immediate sense of life.  Her reflections were thin as mist, coming and going like the mist, with no direction upon her brain, if they sprang from it.  When he had gone, welcome though Arthur had seen him to be, she rebounded to a broader and cheerfuller liveliness.  Arthur was flattered by an idea of her casting off incubus—­a most worthy gentleman, and a not perfectly sympathetic associate.  Her eyes had their lost light in them, her step was brisker; she challenged him to former games of conversation, excursions in blank verse here and there, as the mood dictated.  They amused themselves, and Emma too.  She revelled in seeing Tony’s younger face and hearing some of her natural outbursts.  That Dacier never could have been the man for her, would have compressed and subjected her, and inflicted a further taste of bondage in marriage, she was assured.  She hoped for the day when Tony would know it, and haply that another, whom she little comprehended, was her rightful mate.