The specially womanly exultation of Emma Dunstane in her friend’s noble attitude, seeing how their sex had been struck to the dust for a trifling error, easily to be overlooked by a manful lover, and had asserted its dignity in physical and moral splendour, in self-mastery and benignness, was unshared by Diana.  As soon as the business of the expedition was over, her orders were issued for the sale of the lease of her house and all it contained.  ‘I would sell Danvers too,’ she said, ’but the creature declines to be treated as merchandize.  It seems I have a faithful servant; very much like my life, not quite to my taste; the one thing out of the wreck!—­with my dog!’

Before quitting her house for the return to Copsley, she had to grant Mr. Alexander Hepburn, post-haste from his Caledonia, a private interview.  She came out of it noticeably shattered.  Nothing was related to Emma, beyond the remark:  ’I never knew till this morning the force of No in earnest.’  The weighty little word—­woman’s native watchdog and guardian, if she calls it to her aid in earnest—­had encountered and withstood a fiery ancient host, astonished at its novel power of resistance.

Emma contented herself with the result.  ‘Were you much supplicated?’

‘An Operatic Fourth-Act,’ said Diana, by no means; feeling so flippantly as she spoke.

She received, while under the impression of this man’s, honest, if primitive, ardour of courtship, or effort to capture, a characteristic letter from Westlake, choicely phrased, containing presumeably an application for her hand, in the generous offer of his own.  Her reply to a pursuer of that sort was easy.  Comedy, after the barbaric attack, refreshed her wits and reliance on her natural fencing weapons.  To Westlake, the unwritten No was conveyed in a series of kindly ironic subterfuges, that, played it like an impish flea across the pages, just giving the bloom of the word; and rich smiles come to Emma’s life in reading the dexterous composition:  which, however, proved so thoroughly to Westlake’s taste, that a second and a third exercise in the comedy of the negative had to be despatched to him from Copsley.

CHAPTER XL

In which we see nature making of A woman A maid again, and A thrice whimsical

On their way from London, after leaving the station, the drive through the valley led them past a field, where cricketers were at work bowling and batting under a vertical sun:  not a very comprehensible sight to ladies, whose practical tendencies, as observers of the other sex, incline them to question the gain of such an expenditure of energy.  The dispersal of the alphabet over a printed page is not less perplexing to the illiterate.  As soon as Emma Dunstane discovered the Copsley head-gamekeeper at one wicket, and, actually,