She murmured a few words in his ear.
"Not a bit of it!" said Sir James, violently. "I forbid it. Don't you go and put anything of the sort into her head. The young man I mean her to marry comes back from Nigeria this very day."
"She won't marry him!"
"We shall see."
Diana drove home through lanes suffused with sunset and rich with autumn. There had been much rain through September, and the deluged earth steamed under the return of the sun. Mists were rising from the stubbles, and wrapping the woods in sleep and purple. To her the beauty of it all was of a mask or pageant--seen from a distance across a plain or through a street-opening--lovely and remote. All that was real--all that lived--was the image within the mind; not the great earth-show without.
As she passed through the village she fell in with the Roughsedges: the doctor, with his wide-awake on the back of his head, a book and a bulging umbrella under his arm; Mrs. Roughsedge, in a new shawl, and new bonnet-strings, with a prodigal flutter of side curls beside her ample countenance. Hugh, it appeared, was expected by an evening train. Diana begged that he might be brought up to see her some time in the course of the following afternoon. Then she drove on, and Mrs. Roughsedge was left staring discontentedly at her husband.
"I think she was glad, Henry?"
"Think it, my dear, if it does you any good," said the doctor, cheerfully.