‘They are mine:  Braddock, Thorpe, and Simnel.’

’A good firm.  She is in safe hands with them.  I dare say they may come to an arrangement.’

‘I should wish it.  She will never consent.’

Redworth shrugged.  A woman’s ‘never’ fell far short of outstripping the sturdy pedestrian Time, to his mind.

Diana saw him drive off to catch the coach in the valley, regulated to meet the train, and much though she liked him, she was not sorry that he had gone.  She felt the better clad for it.  She would have rejoiced to witness the departure on wings of all her friends, except Emma, to whom her coldness overnight had bound her anew warmly in contrition.  And yet her friends were well-beloved by her; but her emotions were distraught.

Emma told her that Mr. Redworth had undertaken to hire a suite of convenient rooms, and to these she looked forward, the nest among strangers, where she could begin to write, earning bread:  an idea that, with the pride of independence, conjured the pleasant morning smell of a bakery about her.

She passed three peaceable days at Copsley, at war only with the luxury of the house.  On the fourth, a letter to Lady Dunstane from Redworth gave the address of the best lodgings he could find, and Diana started for London.

She had during a couple of weeks, besides the first fresh exercising of her pen, as well as the severe gratification of economy, a savage exultation in passing through the streets on foot and unknown.  Save for the plunges into the office of her solicitors, she could seem to herself a woman who had never submitted to the yoke.  What a pleasure it was, after finishing a number of pages, to start Eastward toward the lawyer-regions, full of imaginary cropping incidents, and from that churchyard Westward, against smoky sunsets, or in welcome fogs, an atom of the crowd!  She had an affection for the crowd.  They clothed her.  She laughed at the gloomy forebodings of Danvers concerning the perils environing ladies in the streets after dark alone.  The lights in the streets after dark and the quick running of her blood, combined to strike sparks of fancy and inspirit the task of composition at night.  This new, strange, solitary life, cut off from her adulatory society, both by the shock that made the abyss and by the utter foreignness, threw her in upon her natural forces, recasting her, and thinning away her memory of her past days, excepting girlhood, into the remote.  She lived with her girlhood as with a simple little sister.  They were two in one, and she corrected the dreams of the younger, protected and counselled her very sagely, advising her to love Truth and look always to Reality for her refreshment.  She was ready to say, that no habitable spot on our planet was healthier and pleasanter than London.  As to the perils haunting the head of Danvers, her experiences assured her of a perfect immunity from them; and the maligned thoroughfares of a great city, she was ready to affirm, contrasted favourably with certain hospitable halls.