But great, powerful London—­the new universe to her spirit—­was opening its arms to her.  In her half sleep that night she heard the mighty thunder of the city, crashing, tumults of disordered harmonies, and the splendour of the lamp-lighted city appeared to hang up under a dark-blue heaven, removed from earth, like a fresh planet to which she was being beckoned.

At breakfast on the Sunday morning, her departure was necessarily spoken of in public.  Robert talked to her exactly as he had talked to Dahlia, on the like occasion.  He mentioned, as she remembered in one or two instances, the names of the same streets, and professed a similar anxiety as regarded driving her to the station and catching the train.  “That’s a thing which makes a man feel his strength’s nothing,” he said.  “You can’t stop it.  I fancy I could stop a four-in-hand at full gallop.  Mind, I only fancy I could; but when you come to do with iron and steam, I feel like a baby.  You can’t stop trains.”

“You can trip ’em,” said Anthony, a remark that called forth general laughter, and increased the impression that he was a man of resources.

Rhoda was vexed by Robert’s devotion to his strength.  She was going, and wished to go, but she wished to be regretted as well; and she looked at him more.  He, on the contrary, scarcely looked at her at all.  He threw verbal turnips, oats, oxen, poultry, and every possible melancholy matter-of-fact thing, about the table, described the farm and his fondness for it and the neighbourhood; said a farmer’s life was best, and gave Rhoda a week in which to be tired of London.

She sneered in her soul, thinking “how little he knows of the constancy in the nature of women!” adding, “when they form attachments.”

Anthony was shown at church, in spite of a feeble intimation he expressed, that it would be agreeable to him to walk about in the March sunshine, and see the grounds and the wild flowers, which never gave trouble, nor cost a penny, and were always pretty, and worth twenty of your artificial contrivances.

“Same as I say to Miss Dahly,” he took occasion to remark; “but no!—­no good.  I don’t believe women hear ye, when you talk sense of that kind.  ‘Look,’ says I, ‘at a violet.’  ‘Look,’ says she, ‘at a rose.’  Well, what can ye say after that?  She swears the rose looks best.  You swear the violet costs least.  Then there you have a battle between what it costs and how it looks.”

Robert pronounced a conventional affirmative, when called on for it by a look from Anthony.  Whereupon Rhoda cried out,—­

“Dahlia was right—­she was right, uncle.”