He deemed it prudent to hint to his wife that Diana Merion appeared to be meditating upon Mr. Redworth.

‘That is a serious misfortune, if true,’ said Lady Dunstane.  She thought so for two reasons:  Mr. Redworth generally disagreed in opinion with Diana, and contradicted her so flatly as to produce the impression of his not even sharing the popular admiration of her beauty; and, further, she hoped for Diana to make a splendid marriage.  The nibbles threatened to be snaps and bites.  There had been a proposal, in an epistle, a quaint effusion, from a gentleman avowing that he had seen her, and had not danced with her on the night of the Irish ball.  He was rejected, but Diana groaned over the task of replying to the unfortunate applicant, so as not to wound him.  ‘Shall I have to do this often, I wonder?’ she said.

‘Unless you capitulate,’ said her friend.

Diana’s exclamation:  ‘May I be heart-free for another ten years!’ encouraged Lady Dunstane to suppose her husband quite mistaken.

In the Spring Diana, went on a first pilgrimage to her old home, The Crossways, and was kindly entertained by the uncle and aunt of a treasured nephew, Mr. Augustus Warwick.  She rode with him on the Downs.  A visit of a week humanized her view of the intruders.  She wrote almost tenderly of her host and hostess to Lady Dunstane; they had but ’the one fault—­of spoiling their nephew.’  Him she described as a ’gentlemanly official,’ a picture of him.  His age was thirty-four.  He seemed ’fond of her scenery.’  Then her pen swept over the Downs like a flying horse.  Lady Dunstane thought no more of the gentlemanly official.  He was a barrister who did not practise:  in nothing the man for Diana.  Letters came from the house of the Pettigrews in Kent; from London; from Halford Manor in Hertfordshire; from Lockton Grange in Lincolnshire:  after which they ceased to be the thrice weekly; and reading the latest of them, Lady Dunstane imagined a flustered quill.  The letter succeeding the omission contained no excuse, and it was brief.  There was a strange interjection, as to the wearifulness of constantly wandering, like a leaf off the tree.  Diana spoke of looking for a return of the dear winter days at Copsley.  That was her station.  Either she must have had some disturbing experience, or Copsley was dear for a Redworth reason, thought the anxious peruser; musing, dreaming, putting together divers shreds of correspondence and testing them with her intimate knowledge of Diana’s character, Lady Dunstane conceived that the unprotected beautiful girl had suffered a persecution, it might be an insult.  She spelt over the names of the guests at the houses.  Lord Wroxeter was of evil report:  Captain Rampan, a Turf captain, had the like notoriety.  And it is impossible in a great house for the hostess to spread her aegis to cover every dame and damsel present.  She has to depend on the women being discreet, the men civilized.