f
me.'

'In my Case you will please to speak the truth,' said Diana, and beheld
in the looking-glass the primming of her maid's mouth. The sight shot a
sting.

'Understand that there is to be no hesitation about telling the truth of
what you know of me,' said Diana; and the answer was, 'No, ma'am.'

For Danvers could remark to herself that she knew little, and was not
a person to hesitate. She was a maid of the world, with the quality of
faithfulness, by nature, to a good mistress.

Redworth's further difficulties were confined to the hiring of a
conveyance for the travellers, and hot-water bottles, together with a
postillion not addicted to drunkenness. He procured a posting-chariot,
an ancient and musty, of a late autumnal yellow unrefreshed by paint;
the only bottles to be had were Dutch Schiedam. His postillion,
inspected at Storling, carried the flag of habitual inebriation on his
nose, and he deemed it adviseable to ride the mare in accompaniment
as far as Riddlehurst, notwithstanding the postillion's vows upon his
honour that he was no drinker. The emphasis, to a gentleman acquainted
with his countrymen, was not reassuring. He had hopes of enlisting
a trustier fellow at Riddlehurst, but he was disappointed; and while
debating upon what to do, for he shrank from leaving two women to the
conduct of that inflamed troughsnout, Brisby, despatched to Storling by
an afterthought of Lady Dunstane's, rushed out of the Riddlehurst inn
taproom, and relieved him of the charge of the mare. He was accommodated
with a seat on a stool in the chariot. 'My triumphal car,' said his
captive. She was very amusing about her postillion; Danvers had to
beg pardon for laughing. 'You are happy,' observed her mistress. But
Redworth laughed too, and he could not boast of any happiness beyond the
temporary satisfaction, nor could she who sprang the laughter boast
of that little. She said to herself, in the midst of the hilarity,
'Wherever I go now, in all weathers, I am perfectly naked!' And
remembering her readings of a certain wonderful old quarto book in her
father's library, by an eccentric old Scottish nobleman, wherein the
wearing of garments and sleeping in houses is accused as the cause of
human degeneracy, she took a forced merry stand on her return to the
primitive healthful state of man and woman, and affected scorn of our
modern ways of dressing and thinking. Whence it came that she had some
of her wildest seizures of irides