He was invited by Danvers to enter the dining-room.

There Diana joined him.

’The best of a dinner on bread and butter is, that one is ready for supper soon after it,’ she said, swimming to the tea-tray.  ’You have dined?’

‘At the inn,’ he replied.

’The Three Ravens!  When my father’s guests from London flooded The Crossways, The Three Ravens provided the overflow with beds.  On nights like this I have got up and scraped the frost from my window-panes to see them step into the old fly, singing some song of his.  The inn had a good reputation for hospitality in those days.  I hope they treated you well?’

‘Excellently,’ said Redworth, taking an enormous mouthful, while his heart sank to see that she who smiled to encourage his eating had been weeping.  But she also consumed her bread and butter.

’That poor maid of mine is an instance of a woman able to do things against the grain,’ she said.  ’Danvers is a foster-child of luxury.  She loves it; great houses, plentiful meals, and the crowd of twinkling footmen’s calves.  Yet you see her here in a desolate house, consenting to cold, and I know not what, terrors of ghosts! poor soul.  I have some mysterious attraction for her.  She would not let me come alone.  I should have had to hire some old Storling grannam, or retain the tattling keepers of the house.  She loves her native country too, and disdains the foreigner.  My tea you may trust.’

Redworth had not a doubt of it.  He was becoming a tea-taster.  The merit of warmth pertained to the beverage.  ’I think you get your tea from Scoppin’s, in the City,’ he said.

That was the warehouse for Mrs. Warwick’s tea.  They conversed of Teas; the black, the green, the mixtures; each thinking of the attack to come, and the defence.  Meantime, the cut bread and butter having flown, Redwerth attacked the loaf.  He apologized.

‘Oh! pay me a practical compliment,’ Diana said, and looked really happy at his unfeigned relish of her simple fare.

She had given him one opportunity in speaking of her maid’s love of native country.  But it came too early.

‘They say that bread and butter is fattening,’ he remarked.

‘You preserve the mean,’ said she.

He admitted that his health was good.  For some little time, to his vexation at the absurdity, she kept him talking of himself.  So flowing was she, and so sweet the motion of her mouth in utterance, that he followed her lead, and he said odd things and corrected them.  He had to describe his ride to her.

‘Yes! the view of the Downs from Dewhurst,’ she exclaimed.  ’Or any point along the ridge.  Emma and I once drove there in Summer, with clotted cream from her dairy, and we bought fresh-plucked wortleberries, and stewed them in a hollow of the furzes, and ate them with ground biscuits and the clotted cream iced, and thought it a luncheon for seraphs.  Then you dropped to the road round under the sand-heights—­and meditated railways!’