
moreover he reminded himself of her many and memorable phrases of enthusiasm for
England - Shakespeareland, as she would sometimes perversely term it, to sink
the country in the poet. English fortitude, English integrity, the English
disposition to do justice to dependents, adolescent English ingenuousness, she
was always ready to laud. Only her enthusiasm required rousing by circumstances;
it was less at the brim than her satire. Hence she made enemies among a placable
people.
    He felt that he could have helped her under happier conditions. The
beautiful vision she had been on the night of the Irish Ball swept before him,
and he looked at her, smiling.
    »Why do you smile?« she said.
    »I was thinking of Mr. Sullivan Smith.«
    »Ah! my dear compatriot! And think, too, of Lord Larrian.«
    She caught her breath. Instead of recreation, the names brought on a fit of
sadness. It deepened; she neither smiled nor rattled any more. She gazed across
the hedgeways at the white meadows and bare-twigged copses showing their last
leaves in the frost.
    »I remember your words: Observation is the most enduring of the pleasures of
life; and so I have found it,« she said. There was a brightness along her
under-eyelids that caused him to look away.
    The expected catastrophe occurred on the descent of a cutting in the sand,
where their cordial postillion at a trot bumped the chariot against the sturdy
wheels of a waggon, which sent it reclining for support upon a beech-tree's huge
intertwisted serpent roots, amid strips of brown bracken and pendant weeds,
while he exhibited one short stump of leg, all boot, in air. No one was hurt.
Diana disengaged herself from the shoulder of Danvers, and mildly said:
    »That reminds me, I forgot to ask why we came in a chariot.«
    Redworth was excited on her behalf, but the broken glass had done no damage,
nor had Danvers fainted. The remark was unintelligible to him, apart from the
comforting it had been designed to give. He jumped out, and held a hand for them
to do the same. »I never foresaw an event more positively,« said he.
    »And it was nothing but a back view that inspired you all the way,« said
Diana.
    A waggoner held the horses, another assisted Redworth to right the chariot.
The postillion had hastily recovered possession of his official seat, that he
might as soon as possible feel himself again where he was most intelligent, and
was gay in stupidity, indifferent
