have said she was like a lady arming
her knight for battle. On the back of the mare he passed her window,
after lifting his hat, and he thumped at his breast-pocket, to show her
where the letter housed safely. The packet of provision bulged on his
hip, absurdly and blessedly to her sight, not unlike the man, in his
combination of robust serviceable qualities, as she reflected during
the later hours, until the sun fell on smouldering November woods, and
sensations 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 h