The sensitive invalid felt a blow in his following up the simile of the hunted hare for her friend, but it had a promise of hopefulness.  And this was all that could be done by earthly agents, under direction of spiritual, as her imagination encouraged her to believe.

She saw him start, after fortifying him with a tumbler of choice Bordeaux, thinking how Tony would have said she was like a lady arming her knight for battle.  On the back of the mare he passed her window, after lifting his hat, and he thumped at his breast-pocket, to show her where the letter housed safely.  The packet of provision bulged on his hip, absurdly and blessedly to her sight, not unlike the man, in his combination of robust serviceable qualities, as she reflected during the later hours, until the sun fell on smouldering November woods, and sensations of the frost he foretold bade her remember that he had gone forth riding like a huntsman.  His great-coat lay on a chair in the hall, and his travelling-bag was beside it.  He had carried it up from the valley, expecting hospitality, and she had sent him forth half naked to weather a frosty November night!  She called in the groom, whose derision of a great-coat for any gentleman upon Bertha, meaning work for the mare, appeased her remorsefulness.  Brisby, the groom, reckoned how long the mare would take to do the distance to Storling, with a rider like Mr. Redworth on her back.  By seven, Brisby calculated, Mr. Redworth would be knocking at the door of the Three Ravens Inn, at Storling, when the mare would have a decent grooming, and Mr. Redworth was not the gentleman to let her be fed out of his eye.  More than that, Brisby had some acquaintance with the people of the inn.  He begged to inform her ladyship that he was half a Sussex man, though not exactly born in the county; his parents had removed to Sussex after the great event; and the Downs were his first field of horse-exercise, and no place in the world was like them, fair weather or foul, Summer or Winter, and snow ten feet deep in the gullies.  The grandest air in England, he had heard say.

His mistress kept him to the discourse, for the comfort of hearing hard bald matter-of-fact; and she was amused and rebuked by his assumption that she must be entertaining an anxiety about master’s favourite mare.  But, ah! that Diana had delayed in choosing a mate; had avoided her disastrous union with perhaps a more imposing man, to see the true beauty of masculine character in Mr. Redworth, as he showed himself to-day.  How could he have doubted succeeding?  One grain more of faith in his energy, and Diana might have been mated to the right husband for her—­an open-minded clear-faced English gentleman.  Her speculative ethereal mind clung to bald matter-of-fact to-day.  She would have vowed that it was the sole potentially heroical.  Even Brisby partook of the reflected rays, and he was very benevolently considered by her.  She dismissed him only when his recounting of the stages of Bertha’s journey began to fatigue her and deaden the medical efficacy of him and his like.  Stretched on the sofa, she watched the early sinking sun in South-western cloud, and the changes from saffron to intensest crimson, the crown of a November evening, and one of frost.