‘Diana has left me,’ she said, when he reappeared in dry clothing.  ’We are neighbours; she has taken cottage-lodgings at Selshall, about an hour’s walk:—­one of her wild dreams of independence.  Are you disappointed?’

‘I am,’ Redworth confessed.

Emma coloured.  ’She requires an immense deal of humouring at present.  The fit will wear off; only we must wait for it.  Any menace to her precious liberty makes her prickly.  She is passing the day with the Pettigrews, who have taken a place near her village for a month.  She promised to dine and sleep here, if she returned in time.  What is your news?’

‘Nothing; the world wags on.’

‘You have nothing special to tell her?’

‘Nothing’; he hummed; ‘nothing, I fancy, that she does not know.’

‘You said you were disappointed.’

‘It’s always a pleasure to see her.’

‘Even in her worst moods, I find it so.’

‘Oh! moods!’ quoth Redworth.

‘My friend, they are to be reckoned, with women.’

‘Certainly; what I meant was, that I don’t count them against women.’

’Good:  but my meaning was . . .  I think I remember your once comparing them and the weather; and you spoke of the “one point more variable in women.”  You may forestall your storms.  There is no calculating the effect of a few little words at a wrong season.’

’With women!  I suppose not.  I have no pretension to a knowledge of the sex.’

Emma imagined she had spoken plainly enough, if he had immediate designs; and she was not sure of that, and wished rather to shun his confidences while Tony was in her young widowhood, revelling in her joy of liberty.  By and by, was her thought:  perhaps next year.  She dreaded Tony’s refusal of the yoke, and her iron-hardness to the dearest of men proposing it; and moreover, her further to be apprehended holding to the refusal, for the sake of consistency, if it was once uttered.  For her own sake, she shrank from hearing intentions, that distressing the good man, she would have to discountenance.  His candour in confessing disappointment, and his open face, his excellent sense too, gave her some assurance of his not being foolishly impetuous.  After he had read to her for an hour, as his habit was on evenings and wet days, their discussion of this and that in the book lulled any doubts she had of his prudence, enough to render it even a dubious point whether she might be speculating upon a wealthy bachelor in the old-fashioned ultra-feminine manner; the which she so abhorred that she rejected the idea.  Consequently, Redworth’s proposal to walk down to the valley for Diana, and bring her back, struck her as natural when a shaft of western sunshine from a whitened edge of raincloud struck her windows.  She let him go without an intimated monition or a thought of one; thinking simply that her Tony would be more likely to come, having him for escort.  Those are silly women who are always imagining designs and intrigues and future palpitations in the commonest actions of either sex.  Emma Dunstane leaned to the contrast between herself and them.