‘Pray,’ interposed Lady Dunstane, ’specify—­I am rather in a mist—­the exact point upon which you do me the honour to consult me.’  She ridiculed herself for having imagined that such a man would come to consult her upon a point of business.

‘It is,’ he replied, ’this:  whether, as affairs now stand with me—­I have an income from my office, and personal property . . . say between thirteen and fourteen hundred a year to start with—­whether you think me justified in asking a lady to share my lot?’

‘Why not?  But will you name the lady?’

’Then I may write at once?  In your judgement. . . .  Yes, the lady.  I have not named her.  I had no right.  Besides, the general question first, in fairness to the petitioner.  You might reasonably stipulate for more for a friend.  She could make a match, as you have said . . .’ he muttered of ‘brilliant,’ and ‘the highest’; and his humbleness of the honest man enamoured touched Lady Dunstane.  She saw him now as the man of strength that she would have selected from a thousand suitors to guide her dear friend.

She caught at a straw:  ‘Tell me, it is not Diana?’

‘Diana Merion!’

As soon as he had said it he perceived pity, and he drew himself tight for the stroke.  ‘She’s in love with some one?’

‘She is engaged.’

He bore it well.  He was a big-chested fellow, and that excruciating twist within of the revolution of the wheels of the brain snapping their course to grind the contrary to that of the heart, was revealed in one short lift and gasp, a compression of the tremendous change he underwent.

‘Why did you not speak before?’ said Lady Dunstane.  Her words were tremulous.

‘I should have had no justification!’

‘You might have won her!’ She could have wept; her sympathy and her self-condolence under disappointment at Diana’s conduct joined to swell the feminine flood.

The poor fellow’s quick breathing and blinking reminded her of cruelty in a retrospect.  She generalized, to ease her spirit of regret, by hinting it without hurting:  ’Women really are not puppets.  They are not so excessively luxurious.  It is good for young women in the early days of marriage to rough it a little.’  She found herself droning, as he had done.

He had ears for nothing but the fact.

‘Then I am too late!’

‘I have heard it to-day.’

‘She is engaged!  Positively?’

Lady Dunstane glanced backward at the letter on her desk.  She had to answer the strangest of letters that had ever come to her, and it was from her dear Tony, the baldest intimation of the weightiest piece of intelligence which a woman can communicate to her heart’s friend.  The task of answering it was now doubled.  ‘I fear so, I fancy so,’ she said, and she longed to cast eye over the letter again, to see if there might possibly be a loophole behind the lines.

‘Then I must make my mind up to it,’ said Redworth.  ’I think I’ll take a walk.’