He felt that a chance had been.  More sagacious than Lady Dunstane, from his not nursing a wound, he divined in the abruptness of Diana’s resolution to accept a suitor, a sober reason, and a fitting one, for the wish that she might be settled.  And had he spoken!—­If he had spoken to her, she might have given her hand to him, to a dishonourable brute!  A blissful brute.  But a worse than donkey.  Yes, his principle was right, and he lashed with it, and prodded with it, drove himself out into the sour wilds where bachelordom crops noxious weeds without a hallowing luminary, and clung to it, bruised and bleeding though he was.

The gentleness of Lady Dunstane soothed him during the term of a visit that was rather like purgatory sweetened by angelical tears.  He was glad to go, wretched in having gone.  She diverted the incessant conflict between his insubordinate self and his castigating, but avowedly sovereign, principle.  Away from her, he was the victim of a flagellation so dire that it almost drove him to revolt against the lord he served, and somehow the many memories at Copsley kept him away.  Sir Lukin, when speaking of Diana’s ‘engagement to that fellow Warwick,’ exalted her with an extraordinary enthusiasm, exceedingly hard for the silly beast who had lost her to bear.  For the present the place dearest to Redworth of all places on earth was unendurable.

Meanwhile the value of railway investments rose in the market, fast as asparagus-heads for cutting:  a circumstance that added stings to reflection.  Had he been only a little bolder, a little less the fanatical devotee of his rule of masculine honour, less the slave to the letter of success . . . .  But why reflect at all?  Here was a goodly income approaching, perhaps a seat in Parliament; a station for the airing of his opinions—­and a social status for the wife now denied to him.  The wife was denied to him; he could conceive of no other.  The tyrant-ridden, reticent, tenacious creature had thoroughly wedded her in mind; her view of things had a throne beside his own, even in their differences.  He perceived, agreeing or disagreeing, the motions of her brain, as he did with none other of women; and this it is which stamps character on her, divides her from them, upraises and enspheres.  He declined to live with any other of the sex.

Before he could hear of the sort of man Mr. Warwick was—­a perpetual object of his quest—­the bridal bells had rung, and Diana Antonia Merion lost her maiden name.  She became the Mrs. Warwick of our footballing world.

Why she married, she never told.  Possibly, in amazement at herself subsequently, she forgot the specific reason.  That which weighs heavily in youth, and commits us to desperate action, will be a trifle under older eyes, to blunter senses, a more enlightened understanding.  Her friend Emma probed for the reason vainly.  It was partly revealed to Redworth, by guess-work and a putting together of pieces, yet quite luminously, as it were by touch of tentacle-feelers—­one evening that he passed with Sir Lukin Dunstane, when the lachrymose ex-dragoon and son of Idlesse, had rather more than dined.