of it noticeably shattered. Nothing was related to Emma, beyond the remark:
»I never knew till this morning the force of No in earnest.« The weighty little
word - woman's native watchdog and guardian, if she calls it to her aid in
earnest - had encountered and withstood a fiery ancient host, astonished at its
novel power of resistance.
    Emma contented herself with the result. »Were you much supplicated?«
    »An Operatic Fourth-Act,« said Diana, by no means feeling so flippantly as
she spoke.
    She received, while under the impression of this man's honest, if primitive,
ardour of courtship, or effort to capture, a characteristic letter from
Westlake, choicely phrased, containing presumeably an application for her hand,
in the generous offer of his own. Her reply to a pursuer of that sort was easy.
Comedy, after the barbaric attack, refreshed her wits and reliance on her
natural fencing weapons. To Westlake, the unwritten No was conveyed in a series
of kindly ironic subterfuges, that played it like an impish flea across the
pages, just giving the bloom of the word; and rich smiles come to Emma's life in
reading the dexterous composition: which, however, proved so thoroughly to
Westlake's taste, that a second and a third exercise in the comedy of the
negative had to be despatched to him from Copsley.
 

                                   Chapter XL

 In which We See Nature Making of a Woman a Maid Again, and a Thrice Whimsical

On their way from London, after leaving the station, the drive through the
valley led them past a field, where cricketers were at work bowling and batting
under a vertical sun: not a very comprehensible sight to ladies, whose practical
tendencies, as observers of the other sex, incline them to question the gain of
such an expenditure of energy. The dispersal of the alphabet over a printed page
is not less perplexing to the illiterate. As soon as Emma Dunstane discovered
the Copsley head-gamekeeper at one wicket, and, actually, Thomas Redworth facing
him, bat in hand, she sat up, greatly interested. Sir Lukin stopped the carriage
at the gate, and reminded his wife that it was the day of the year for the men
of his estate to encounter a valley Eleven. Redworth, like the good fellow he
was, had come down by appointment in the morning out of London, to fill the
number required, Copsley being weak this year. Eight of their wickets had fallen
for a lamentable figure of twenty-nine runs; himself clean-bowled the first
ball. But Tom