It was decided that four only should occupy the vehicle, Miss Moorhouse and Fanny Warricombe to be the two ladies.  Godwin regretted Sidwell’s omission, but the friendly informality of the arrangement delighted him.  When the carriage rolled softly from the gravelled drive, Buckland holding the reins, he felt an animation such as no event had ever produced in him.  N6 longer did he calculate phrases.  A spontaneous aptness marked his dialogue with Miss Moorhouse, and the laughing words he now and then addressed to Fanny.  For a short time Buckland was laconic, but at length he entered into the joyous tone of the occasion.  Earwaker would have stood in amazement, could he have seen and heard the saturnine denizen of Peckham Rye.

The weather was superb.  A sea-breeze mitigated the warmth of the cloudless sun, and where a dark pine-tree rose against the sky it gave the azure depths a magnificence unfamiliar to northern eyes.

‘On such a day as this,’ remarked Miss Moorhouse, dividing her look between Buckland and his friend, ’one feels that there’s a good deal to be said for England.’

‘But for the vile weather,’ was Warricombe’s reply, ’you wouldn’t know such enjoyment.’

’Oh, I can’t agree with that for a moment!  My capacity for enjoyment is unlimited.  That philosophy is unworthy of you; it belongs to a paltry scheme called “making the best of things".’

‘In which you excel, Miss Moorhouse.’

‘That she does!’ agreed Fanny—­a laughing, rosy-cheeked maiden.

’I deny it!  No one is more copious in railing against circumstances.’

‘But you turn them all to a joke,’ Fanny objected.

’That’s my profound pessimism.  I am misunderstood.  No one expects irony from a woman.’

Peak found it difficult not to gaze too persistently at the subtle countenance.  He was impelled to examine it by a consciousness that he himself received a large share of Miss Moorhouse’s attention, and a doubt as to the estimation in which she held him.  Canon Grayling’s sermon and Godwin’s comment had elicited no remark from her.  Did she belong to the ranks of emancipated women?  With his experience of Marcella Moxey, he welcomed the possibility of this variation of the type, but at the same time, in obedience to a new spirit that had strange possession of him, recognised that such phenomena no longer aroused his personal interest.  By the oddest of intellectual processes he had placed himself altogether outside the sphere of unorthodox spirits.  Concerning Miss Moorhouse he cared only for the report she might make of him to the Warricombes.