s of the frost he foretold bade her remember that he had gone
forth riding like a huntsman. His great-coat lay on a chair in the hall,
and his travelling-bag was beside it. He had carried it up from the
valley, expecting hospitality, and she had sent him forth half naked to
weather a frosty November night! She called in the groom, whose derision
of a great-coat for any gentleman upon Bertha, meaning work for the mare,
appeased her remorsefulness. Brisby, the groom, reckoned how long the
mare would take to do the distance to Storling, with a rider like Mr.
Redworth on her back. By seven, Brisby calculated, Mr. Redworth would be
knocking at the door of the Three Ravens Inn, at Storling, when the mare
would have a decent grooming, and Mr. Redworth was not the gentleman to
let her be fed out of his eye. More than that, Brisby had some
acquaintance with the people of the inn. He begged to inform her ladyship
that he was half a Sussex man, though not exactly born in the county; his
parents had removed to Sussex after the great event; and the Downs were
his first field of horse-exercise, and no place in the world was like
them, fair weather or foul, Summer or Winter, and snow ten feet deep in
the gullies. The grandest air in England, he had heard say.

His mistress kept him to the discourse, for the comfort of hearing hard
bald matter-of-fact; and she was amused and rebuked by his assumption
that she must be entertaining an anxiety about master's favourite mare.
But, ah! that Diana had delayed in choosing a mate; had avoided her
disastrous union with perhaps a more imposing man, to see the true beauty
of masculine character in Mr. Redworth, as he showed himself to-day. How
could he have doubted succeeding? One grain more of faith in his energy,
and Diana might have been mated to the right husband for her--an
open-minded clear-faced English gentleman. Her speculative ethereal mind
clung to bald matter-of-fact to-day. She would have vowed that it was the
sole potentially heroical. Even Brisby partook of the reflected rays, and
he was very benevolently considered by her. She dismissed him only when
his recounting of the stages of Bertha's journey began to fatigue her and
deaden the medical efficacy of him and his like. Stretched on the sofa,
she watched the early sinking sun in South-western cloud, and the changes
from saffron to intensest crimson, the crown of a November evening, and
one of frost.

Redworth struck on a southward