eroical. 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 line from chalk-ridge to sand, where he
had a pleasant footing in familiar country, under beeches that browned
the ways, along beside a meadowbrook fed by the heights, through pines
and across deep sand-ruts to full view of weald and Downs. Diana had
been with him here in her maiden days. The coloured back of a coach put
an end to that dream. He lightened his pocket, surveying the land as he
munched. A favourable land for rails: and she had looked over it: and
he was now becoming a wealthy man: and she was a married woman straining
the leash. His errand would not bear examination, it seemed such
a desperate long shot. He shut his inner vision on it, and pricked
forward. When the burning sunset shot waves above the juniper and yews
behind him, he was far on the weald, trotting down an interminable road.
That the people opposing railways were not people of business, was his
reflection, and it returned persistently: for practical men, even the
most devoted among them, will think for themselves; their army, which
is the rational, calls them to its banners, in opposition to the
sentimental; and Redworth joined it in the abstract, summoning the
horrible state of the roads to testify against an enemy wanting almost
in common humaneness. A slip of his excellent stepper in one of the
half-frozen pits of the highway was the principal cause of his confusion
of logic; she was half on her knees. Beyond the market town the roads
were so bad that he quitted them, and with the indifference of an
engineer, struck a line of his own Southeastward over fields and
ditches, favoured by a round horizon moon on his left. So for a couple
of hours he went ahead over rolling fallow land to the meadow-flats and
a pale shining of freshets; then hit on a lane skirting the water,
and reached an amphibious village; five miles from Storling, he was
informed, and a clear traverse of lanes, not to be mistaken, 'if he kept
a sharp eye open.' The sharpness of his eyes was divided between the
sword-b