'Why did you not speak before?' said Lady Dunstane. Her words were tremulous.
'I should have had no justification!'
'You might have won her!' She could have wept; her sympathy and her self-condolence under disappointment at Diana's conduct joined to swell the feminine flood.
The poor fellow's quick breathing and blinking reminded her of cruelty in a retrospect. She generalized, to ease her spirit of regret, by hinting it without hurting: 'Women really are not puppets. They are not so excessively luxurious. It is good for young women in the early days of marriage to rough it a little.' She found herself droning, as he had done.
He had ears for nothing but the fact.
'Then I am too late!'
'I have heard it to-day.'
'She is engaged! Positively?'
Lady Dunstane glanced backward at the letter on her desk. She had to answer the strangest of letters that had ever come to her, and it was from her dear Tony, the baldest intimation of the weightiest piece of intelligence which a woman can communicate to her heart's friend. The task of answering it was now doubled. 'I fear so, I fancy so,' she said, and she longed to cast eye over the letter again, to see if there might possibly be a loophole behind the lines.
'Then I must make my mind up to it,' said Redworth. 'I think I'll take a walk.'