at the acid of an irony that seemed to spring from aversion, and regretted it, for her sake.  He had to recollect that she was in a sharp-strung mood, bitterly surexcited; moreover he reminded himself of her many and memorable phrases of enthusiasm for England—­Shakespeareland, as she would sometimes perversely term it, to sink the country in the poet.  English fortitude, English integrity, the English disposition to do justice to dependents, adolescent English ingenuousness, she was always ready to laud.  Only her enthusiasm required rousing by circumstances; it was less at the brim than her satire.  Hence she made enemies among a placable people.

He felt that he could have helped her under happier conditions.  The beautiful vision she had been on the night of the Irish Ball swept before him, and he looked at her, smiling.

‘Why do you smile?’ she said.

‘I was thinking of Mr. Sullivan Smith.’

‘Ah! my dear compatriot!  And think, too, of Lord Larrian.’

She caught her breath.  Instead of recreation, the names brought on a fit of sadness.  It deepened; shy neither smiled nor rattled any more.  She gazed across the hedgeways at the white meadows and bare-twigged copses showing their last leaves in the frost.

’I remember your words:  “Observation is the most, enduring of the pleasures of life”; and so I have found it,’ she said.  There was a brightness along her under-eyelids that caused him to look away.

The expected catastrophe occurred on the descent of a cutting in the sand, where their cordial postillion at a trot bumped the chariot against the sturdy wheels of a waggon, which sent it reclining for support upon a beech-tree’s huge intertwisted serpent roots, amid strips of brown bracken and pendant weeds, while he exhibited one short stump of leg, all boot, in air.  No one was hurt.  Diana disengaged herself from the shoulder of Danvers, and mildly said: 

‘That reminds me, I forgot to ask why we came in a chariot.’

Redworth was excited on her behalf, but the broken glass had done no damage, nor had Danvers fainted.  The remark was unintelligible to him, apart from the comforting it had been designed to give.  He jumped out, and held a hand for them to do the same.  ’I never foresaw an event more positively,’ said he.

‘And it was nothing but a back view that inspired you all the way,’ said Diana.

A waggoner held the horses, another assisted Redworth to right the chariot.  The postillion had hastily recovered possession of his official seat, that he might as soon as possible feel himself again where he was most intelligent, and was gay in stupidity, indifferent to what happened behind him.  Diana heard him counselling the waggoner as to the common sense of meeting small accidents with a cheerful soul.

‘Lord!’ he cried, ’I been pitched a Somerset in my time, and taken up for dead, and that didn’t beat me!’