e sentence: 'Emma is a wife!' The
character of her husband was not considered, nor was the meaning of the
exclamation pursued.

They drove through the gorse into wild land of heath and flowering
hawthorn, and along by tracts of yew and juniper to another point,
jutting on a furzy sand-mound, rich with the mild splendour of English
scenery, which Emma stamped on her friend's mind by saying: 'A cripple
has little to envy in you who can fly when she has feasts like these at
her doors.'

They had an inclination to boast on the drive home of the solitude they
had enjoyed; and just then, as the road in the wood wound under great
beeches, they beheld a London hat. The hat was plucked from its head. A
clear-faced youth, rather flushed, dusty at the legs, addressed Diana.

'Mr. Rhodes!' she said, not discouragingly.

She was petitioned to excuse him; he thought she would wish to hear the
news in town last night as early as possible; he hesitated and murmured
it.

Diana turned to Emma: 'Lord Dannisburgh!' her paleness told the rest.

Hearing from Mr. Rhodes that he had walked the distance from town,
and had been to Copsley, Lady Dunstane invited him to follow
the pony-carriage thither, where he was fed and refreshed by a
tea-breakfast, as he preferred walking on tea, he said. 'I took the
liberty to call at Mrs. Warwick's house,' he informed her; 'the
footman said she was at Copsley. I found it on the map--I knew the
directions--and started about two in the morning. I wanted a walk.'

It was evident to her that he was one of the young squires bewitched
whom beautiful women are constantly enlisting. There was no concealment
of it, though he stirred a sad enviousness in the invalid lady by
descanting on the raptures of a walk out of London in the youngest light
of day, and on the common objects he had noticed along the roadside,
and through the woods, more sustaining, closer with nature than her
compulsory feeding on the cream of things.

'You are not fatigued?' she inquired, hoping for that confession at
least; but she pardoned his boyish vaunting to walk the distance back
without any fatigue at all.

He had a sweeter reward for his pains; and if the business of the
chronicler allowed him to become attached to pure throbbing felicity
wherever it is encountered, he might be diverted by the blissful
unexpectedness of good fortune befalling Mr. Arthur Rhodes in having the
honour to conduct Mrs. Warwick to town. No imagined