They had an inclination to boast on the drive home of the solitude they had enjoyed; and just then, as the road in the wood wound under great beeches, they beheld a London hat.  The hat was plucked from its head.  A clear-faced youth, rather flushed, dusty at the legs, addressed Diana.

‘Mr. Rhodes!’ she said, not discouragingly.

She was petitioned to excuse him; he thought she would wish to hear the news in town last night as early as possible; he hesitated and murmured it.

Diana turned to Emma:  ‘Lord Dannisburgh!’ her paleness told the rest.

Hearing from Mr. Rhodes that he had walked the distance from town, and had been to Copsley, Lady Dunstane invited him to follow the pony-carriage thither, where he was fed and refreshed by a tea-breakfast, as he preferred walking on tea, he said.  ’I took the liberty to call at Mrs. Warwick’s house,’ he informed her; ’the footman said she was at Copsley.  I found it on the map—­I knew the directions—­and started about two in the morning.  I wanted a walk.’

It was evident to her that he was one of the young squires bewitched whom beautiful women are constantly enlisting.  There was no concealment of it, though he stirred a sad enviousness in the invalid lady by descanting on the raptures of a walk out of London in the youngest light of day, and on the common objects he had noticed along the roadside, and through the woods, more sustaining, closer with nature than her compulsory feeding on the cream of things.

‘You are not fatigued?’ she inquired, hoping for that confession at least; but she pardoned his boyish vaunting to walk the distance back without any fatigue at all.

He had a sweeter reward for his pains; and if the business of the chronicler allowed him to become attached to pure throbbing felicity wherever it is encountered, he might be diverted by the blissful unexpectedness of good fortune befalling Mr. Arthur Rhodes in having the honour to conduct Mrs. Warwick to town.  No imagined happiness, even in the heart of a young man of two and twenty, could have matched it.  He was by her side, hearing and seeing her, not less than four hours.  To add to his happiness, Lady Dunstane said she would be glad to welcome him again.  She thought him a pleasant specimen of the self-vowed squire.

Diana was sure that there would be a communication for her of some sort at her house in London; perhaps a message of farewell from the dying lord, now dead.  Mr. Rhodes had only the news of the evening journals, to the effect that Lord Dannisburgh had expired at his residence, the Priory, Hallowmere, in Hampshire.  A message of farewell from him, she hoped for:  knowing him as she did, it seemed a certainty; and she hungered for that last gleam of life in her friend.  She had no anticipation of the burden of the message awaiting her.