‘Your commands?’

The handsome Amabel threw him a sombre glance from the corners of her uplifted eyelids; and snakish he felt it; but her colour and the line of her face went well with sullenness; and, her arts of fascination cast aside, she fascinated him more in seeming homelier, girlish.  If the trial of her beauty of a woman in a temper can bear the strain, she has attractive lures indeed; irresistible to the amorous idler:  and when, in addition, being the guilty person, she plays the injured, her show of temper on the taking face pitches him into perplexity with his own emotions, creating a desire to strike and be stricken, howl and set howling, which is of the happiest augury for tender reconcilement, on the terms of the gentleman on his kneecap.

‘You’ve been doing a pretty thing!’ she said, and briefly she named her house and half an hour, and flew.  Sir Lukin was left to admire the figure of the horsewoman.  Really, her figure had an air of vindicating her successfully, except for the poison she spat at Diana Warwick.  And what pretty thing had he been doing?  He reviewed dozens of speculations until the impossibility of seizing one determined him to go to Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett at the end of the half-hour—­’Just to see what these women have to say for themselves.’

Some big advance drops of Redworth’s thunderstorm drawing gloomily overhead, warned him to be quick and get his horse into stables.  Dismounted, the sensational man was irresolute, suspecting a female trap.  But curiosity, combined with the instinctive turning of his nose in the direction of the lady’s house, led him thither, to an accompaniment of celestial growls, which impressed him, judging by that naughty-girl face of hers and the woman’s tongue she had, as a likely prelude to the scene to come below.

CHAPTER XLII

The penultimate:  Showing A final struggle for liberty and run into harness

The prophet of the storm had forgotten his prediction; which, however, was of small concern to him, apart from the ducking he received midway between the valley and the heights of Copsley; whither he was bound, on a mission so serious that, according to his custom in such instances, he chose to take counsel of his active legs:  an adviseable course when the brain wants clearing and the heart fortifying.  Diana’s face was clearly before him through the deluge; now in ogle features, the dimple running from her mouth, the dark bright eyes and cut of eyelids, and nostrils alive under their lightning; now inkier whole radiant smile, or musefully listening, nursing a thought.  Or she was obscured, and he felt the face.  The individuality of it had him by the heart, beyond his powers of visioning.  On his arrival, he stood in the hall, adrip like one of the trees of the lawn, laughing at Lady Dunstane’s anxious exclamations.  His portmanteau had come and he was expected; she hurried out at the first ringing of the bell, to greet and reproach him for walking in such weather.