March continued South-westerly and grew rainier, as Redworth had foretold, bidding them look for gales and storm, and then the change of wind.  It came, after wettings of a couple scorning the refuge of dainty townsfolk under umbrellas, and proud of their likeness to dripping wayside wildflowers.  Arthur stayed at Copsley for a week of the crisp North-easter; and what was it, when he had taken his leave, that brought Tony home from her solitary walk in dejection?  It could not be her seriously regretting the absence of the youthful companion she had parted with gaily, appointing a time for another meeting on the heights, and recommending him to repair idle hours with strenuous work.  The fit passed and was not explained.  The winds are sharp with memory.  The hard shrill wind crowed to her senses of an hour on the bleak sands of the French coast; the beginning of the curtained misery, inscribed as her happiness.  She was next day prepared for her term in London with Emma, who promised her to make an expedition at the end of it by way of holiday, to see The Crossways, which Mr. Redworth said was not tenanted.

‘You won’t go through it like a captive?’ said Emma.

‘I don’t like it, dear,’ Diana put up a comic mouth.  ’The debts we owe ourselves are the hardest to pay.  That is the discovery of advancing age:  and I used to imagine it was quite the other way.  But they are the debts of honour, imperative.  I shall go through it grandly, you will see.  If I am stopped at my first recreancy and turned directly the contrary way, I think I have courage.’

‘You will not fear to meet . . . any one?’ said Emma.

’The world and all it contains!  I am robust, eager for the fray, an Amazon, a brazen-faced hussy.  Fear and I have parted.  I shall not do you discredit.  Besides you intend to have me back here with you?  And besides again, I burn to make a last brave appearance.  I have not outraged the world, dear Emmy, whatever certain creatures in it may fancy.’

She had come out of her dejectedness with a shrewder view of Dacier; equally painful, for it killed her romance, and changed the garden of their companionship in imagination to a waste.  Her clearing intellect prompted it, whilst her nature protested, and reviled her to uplift him.  He had loved her.  ‘I shall die knowing that a man did love me once,’ she said to her widowed heart, and set herself blushing and blanching.  But the thought grew inveterate:  ‘He could not bear much.’  And in her quick brain it shot up a crop of similitudes for the quality of that man’s love.  She shuddered, as at a swift cleaving of cold steel.  He had not given her a chance; he had not replied to her letter written with the pen dipped in her heart’s blood; he must have gone straight away to the woman he married.  This after almost justifying the scandalous world:—­after . . .  She realized her sensations of that night when the house-door had closed on him; her feeling