Meanwhile she was as little conscious of what she was doing as of how she appeared.  Arthur went about with the moony air of surcharged sweetness, and a speculation on it, alternately tiptoe and prostrate.  More of her intoxicating wine was administered to him, in utter thoughtlessness of consequences to one who was but a boy and a friend, almost of her own rearing.  She told Emma, when leaving The Crossways, that she had no desire to look on the place again:  she wondered at Mr. Redworth’s liking such a solitude.  In truth, the look back on it let her perceive that her husband haunted it, and disfigured the man, of real generosity, as her heart confessed, but whom she accused of a lack of prescient delicacy, for not knowing she would and must be haunted there.  Blaming him, her fountain of colour shot up, at a murmur of her unjustness and the poor man’s hopes.

A week later, the youth she publicly named ‘her Arthur’ came down to Copsley with news of his having been recommended by Mr. Redworth for the post of secretary to an old Whig nobleman famous for his patronage of men of letters.  And besides, he expected to inherit, he said, and gazed in a way to sharpen her instincts.  The wine he had drunk of late from her flowing vintage was in his eyes.  They were on their usual rambles out along the heights.  ‘Accept, by all means, and thank Mr. Redworth,’ said she, speeding her tongue to intercept him.  ’Literature is a good stick and a bad horse.  Indeed, I ought to know.  You can always write; I hope you will.’

She stepped fast, hearing:  ‘Mrs. Warwick—­Diana!  May I take your hand?’

This was her pretty piece of work!  ’Why should you?  If you speak my Christian name, no:  you forfeit any pretext.  And pray, don’t loiter.  We are going at the pace of the firm of Potter and Dawdle, and you know they never got their shutters down till it was time to put them up again.’

Nimble-footed as she was, she pressed ahead too fleetly for amorous eloquence to have a chance.  She heard ‘Diana!’ twice, through the rattling of her discourse and flapping of her dress.

’Christian names are coin that seem to have an indifferent valuation of the property they claim,’ she said in the Copsley garden; ’and as for hands, at meeting and parting, here is the friendliest you could have.  Only don’t look rueful.  My dear Arthur, spare me that, or I shall blame myself horribly.’

His chance had gone, and he composed his face.  No hope in speaking had nerved him; merely the passion to speak.  Diana understood the state, and pitied the naturally modest young fellow, and chafed at herself as a senseless incendiary, who did mischief right and left, from seeking to shun the apparently inevitable.  A sidethought intruded, that he would have done his wooing poetically—­not in the burly storm, or bull-Saxon, she apprehended.  Supposing it imperative with her to choose?  She looked up, and the bird of broader wing darkened the whole sky, bidding her know that she had no choice.