Chapter 15

Owing to the scantiness of Sunday trains, Marsham did not arrive at Beechcote village till between nine and ten at night. He left his bag at the village inn, tried to ignore the scarcely concealed astonishment with which the well-known master--or reputed master--of Tallyn was received within its extremely modest walls, and walked up to the manor-house. There he had a short conversation with Mrs. Colwood, who did not propose to tell Diana of his arrival till the morning.

"She does not know that I wrote to you," said the little lady, in her pale distress. "She wrote to you herself this evening. I hope I have not done wrong."

Marsham reassured her, and they had a melancholy consultation. Diana, it seemed, had insisted on getting up that day as usual. She had tottered across to her sitting-room and had spent the day there alone, writing a few letters, or sitting motionless in her chair for hours together. She had scarcely eaten, and Mrs. Colwood was sure she had not slept at all since the shock. It was to be hoped that out of sheer fatigue she might sleep, on this, the second night. But it was essential there should be no fresh excitement, such as the knowledge of Marsham's arrival would certainly arouse.

Mrs. Colwood could hardly bring herself to speak of Fanny Merton. She was, of course, still in the house--sulking--and inclined to blame everybody, her dead uncle in particular, rather than herself. But, mercifully, she was departing early on the Monday morning--to some friends in London.

"If you come after breakfast you will find Miss Mallory alone. I will tell her first thing that you are here."

Marsham assented, and got up to take his leave. Involuntarily he looked round the drawing-room where he had first seen Diana the day before. Then it was flooded by spring sunshine--not more radiant than her face. Now a solitary lamp made a faint spot of light amid the shadows of the panelled walls. He and Mrs. Colwood spoke almost in whispers. The old house, generally so winning and sympathetic, seemed to hold itself silent and aloof--as though in this touch of calamity the living were no longer its master and the dead generations woke. And, up-stairs, Diana lay perhaps in her white bed, miserable and alone, not knowing that he was there, within a few yards of her.

Mrs. Colwood noiselessly opened a garden door and so dismissed him. It was moonlight outside, and instead of returning to the inn he took the road up the hill to the crest of the encircling down. Diverging a little to the left, he found himself on the open hill-side, at a point commanding the village and Beechcote itself, ringed by its ancient woods. In the village two dim lights, far apart, were visible; lights, he thought, of sickness or of birth?--for the poor sleep early. One of the Beechcote windows shone with a dim illumination. Was she there, and sleepless? The sky was full of light; the blanched chalk down on which he stood ran northward in a shining curve, bare in the moon; but in the hollow below, and on the horizon, the dark huddled woods kept watch, guarding the secrets of night. The owls were calling in the trees behind him--some in faint prolonged cry, one in a sharp shrieking note. And at whiles a train rushed upon the ear, held it, and died away; or a breeze crept among the dead beech leaves at his feet. Otherwise not a sound or show of life; Marsham was alone with night and himself.

Twenty-four hours--little more--since on that same hill-side he had held Diana in his arms in the first rapture of love. What was it that had changed? How was it--for he was frank with himself--that the love which had been then the top and completion of his life, the angel of all good-fortune within and without, had become now, to some extent, a burden to be borne, an obligation to be met?

Certainly, he loved her well. But she came to him now, bringing as her marriage portion, not easy joy and success, the full years of prosperity and ambition, but poverty, effort, a certain measure of disgrace, and the perpetual presence of a ghastly and heart-breaking memory. He shrank from this last in a positive and sharp impatience. Why should Juliet Sparling's crime affect him?--depress the vigor and cheerfulness of his life?

As to the effort before him, he felt toward it as a man of weak unpractised muscle who endeavors with straining to raise a physical weight. He would make the effort, but it would tax his whole strength. As he strolled along the down, dismally smoking and pondering, he made himself contemplate the then and now--taking stock, as it were, of his life. In this truth-compelling darkness, apart from the stimulus of his mother's tyranny, he felt himself to be two men: one in love with Diana, the other in love with success and political ambition, and money as the agent and servant of both. He had never for one moment envisaged the first love--Diana--as the alternative to, or substitute for the second love--success. As he had conceived her up to twenty-four hours before, Diana was to be, indeed, one of the chief elements and ministers of success. In winning her, he was, in fact, to make the best of both worlds. A certain cool analytic gift that he possessed put all this plainly before him. And now it must be a choice between Diana and all those other desirable things.

Take the poverty first. What would it amount to? He knew approximately what was Diana's fortune. He had meant--with easy generosity--to leave it all in her hands, to do what she would with. Now, until his mother came to her senses, they must chiefly depend upon it. What could he add to it? He had been called to the Bar, but had never practised. Directorships no doubt, he might get, like other men; though not so easily now, if it was to be known that his mother meant to make a pauper of him. And once a man whom he had met in political life, who was no doubt ignorant of his private circumstances, had sounded him as to whether he would become the London correspondent of a great American paper. He had laughed then, good-humoredly, at the proposal. Perhaps the thing might still be open. It would mean a few extra hundreds.

He laughed again as he thought of it, but not good-humoredly. The whole thing was so monstrous! His mother had close on twenty thousand a year! For all her puritanical training she liked luxury--of a certain kind--and had brought up her son in it. Marsham had never gambled or speculated or raced. It was part of his democratic creed and his Quaker Ancestry to despise such modes of wasting money, and to be scornful of the men who indulged in them. But the best of housing, service, and clothes; the best shooting, whether in England or Scotland; the best golfing, fishing, and travelling: all these had come to him year after year since his boyhood, without question. His mother, of course, had provided the majority of them, for his own small income and his allowance from her were absorbed by his personal expenses, his Parliamentary life, and the subscriptions to the party, which--in addition to his mother's--made him, as he was well aware, a person of importance in its ranks, quite apart from his record in the House.

Now all that must be given up. He would be reduced to an income--including what he imagined to be Diana's--of less than half his personal spending hitherto; and those vast perspectives implied in the inheritance at his mother's death of his father's half million must also be renounced.

No doubt he could just maintain himself in Parliament. But everything--judged by the standards he had been brought up in--would be difficult where everything till now had been ease.

He knew his mother too well to doubt her stubbornness, and his feeling was bitter, indeed. Bitter, too, against his father, who had left him in this plight. Why had his father distrusted and wronged him so? He recalled with discomfort certain collisions of his youth; certain disappointments at school and college he had inflicted on his father's ambition; certain lectures and gibes from that strong mouth, in his early manhood. Absurd! If his father had had to do with a really spendthrift and unsatisfactory son, there might have been some sense in it. But for these trifles--these suspicions--these foolish notions of a doctrinaire--to inflict this stigma and this yoke on him all his days!

Suddenly his wanderings along the moon-lit hill came to a stand-still. For he recognized the hollow in the chalk--the gnarled thorn--the wide outlook. He stood gazing about him--a shamed lover; conscious of a dozen contradictory feelings. Beautiful and tender Diana!--"Stick to her, Oliver!--she is worth it!" Chide's eager and peremptory tone smote on the inward ear. Of course he would stick to her. The only thing which it gave him any pleasure to remember in this nightmare of a day was his own answer to Ferrier's suggestion that Diana might release him: "Do you imagine I could be such a hound as to let her?" As he said it, he had been conscious that the words rang well; that he had struck the right attitude, and done the right thing. Of course he had done the right thing! What would he, or any other decent person, have thought of a man who could draw back from his word, for such a cause?

No!--he resigned himself. He would do nothing mean and ungentlemanly. A policy of waiting and diplomacy should be tried. Ferrier might be of some use. But, if nothing availed, he must marry and make the best of it. He wondered to what charitable societies his mother would leave her money!

Slowly he strolled back along the hill. That dim light, high up on the shrouded walls of Beechcote, seemed to go with him, softly, insistently reminding him of Diana. The thought of her moved him deeply. He longed to have her in his arms, to comfort her, to feel her dependent on him for the recovery of joy and vitality. It was only by an obstinate and eager dwelling upon her sweetness and charm that he could protect himself against the rise of an invading wave of repugnance and depression; the same repugnance, the same instinctive longing to escape, which he had always felt, as boy or man, in the presence of sickness, or death, or mourning.

* * * * *

Marsham had been long asleep in his queer little room at "The Green Man." The last lights were out in the village, and the moon had set. Diana stole out of bed; Muriel must not hear her, Muriel whose eyes were already so tired and tear-worn with another's grief. She went to the window, and, throwing a shawl over her, she knelt there, looking out. She was dimly conscious of stars, of the hill, the woods; what she really _saw_ was a prison room as she was able to imagine it, and her mother lying there--her young mother--only four years older than she, Diana, was now. Or again she saw the court of law--the judge in the black cap--and her mother looking up. Fanny had said she was small and slight--with dark hair.

The strange frozen horror of it made tears--or sleep--or rest--impossible. She did not think much of Marsham; she could hardly remember what she had written to him. Love was only another anguish. Nor could it protect her from the images which pursued her. The only thought which seemed to soothe the torture of imagination was the thought stamped on her brain tissue by the long inheritance of centuries--the thought of Christ on Calvary. "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" The words repeated themselves again and again. She did not pray in words. But her agony crept to the foot of what has become through the action and interaction of two thousand years, the typical and representative agony of the world, and, clinging there, made wild appeal, like the generations before her, to a God in whose hand lie the creatures of His will.

* * * * *

"Mrs. Colwood said I might come and say good-bye to you," said Fanny Merton, holding her head high.

She stood on the threshold of Diana's little sitting-room, looking in. There was an injured pride in her bearing, balanced by a certain anxiety which seemed to keep it within bounds.

"Please come in," said Diana.

She rose with difficulty from the table where she was forcing herself to write a letter. Had she followed her own will she would have been up at her usual time and down to breakfast. But she had turned faint while dressing, and Mrs. Colwood had persuaded her to let some tea be brought up-stairs.

Fanny came in, half closing the door.

"Well, I'm off," she said, flushing. "I dare say you won't want to see _me_ again."

Diana came feebly forward, clinging to the chairs.

"It wasn't your fault. I must have known--some time."

Fanny looked at her uneasily.

"Well, of course, that's true. But I dare say I--well I'm no good at beating about the bush, never was! And I was in a temper, too--that was at the bottom of it."

Diana made no reply. Her eyes, magnified by exhaustion and pallor, seemed to be keeping a pitiful shrinking watch lest she should be hurt again--past bearing. It was like the shrinking of a child that has been tortured, from its tormentor.

"You are going to London?"

"Yes. You remember those Devonshire people I went to stay with? One of the girls is up in London with her aunt. I'm going to board with them a bit."

"My lawyers will send the thousand pounds to Aunt Merton when they have arranged for it," said Diana, quietly. "Is that what you wish?"

A look of relief she could not conceal slipped into Fanny's countenance.

"You're going to give it us--after all?" she said, stumbling over the words.

"I promised to give it you."

Fanny fidgeted, but even her perceptions told her that further thanks would be out of place.

"Mother'll write to you, of course. And you'd better send fifty pounds of it to me. I can't go home under three months, and I shall run short."

"Very well," said Diana.

"Good-bye," said Fanny, coming a little nearer. Then she looked round her, with a first genuine impulse of something like remorse--if the word is not too strong. It was rather, perhaps, a consciousness of having managed her opportunities extremely badly. "I'm sorry you didn't like me." she said, abruptly, "and I didn't mean to be nasty."

"Good-bye." Diana held out her hand; yet trembling involuntarily as she did so. Fanny broke out:

"Diana, why do you look like that? It's all so long ago--you can't do anything--you ought to try and forget it."

"No, I can't do anything," said Diana, withdrawing her right hand from her cousin, and clasping both on her breast. "I can only--"

But the word died on her lips; she turned abruptly away, adding, hurriedly, in another tone: "If you ever want anything, you know we're always here--Mrs. Colwood and I. Please give us your address."

"Thanks." Fanny retreated; but could not forbear, as she reached the door, from letting loose the thought which burned her inner mind. She turned round deliberately. "Mr. Marsham'll cheer you up, Diana!--you'll see. Of course, he'll behave like a gentleman. It won't make a bit of difference to you. I'll just ask Mrs. Colwood to tell me when it's all fixed up."

Diana said nothing. She was hanging over the fire, and her face was hidden. Fanny waited a moment, then opened the door and went.

* * * * *

As soon as the carriage conveying Miss Merton to the station had safely driven off, Mrs. Colwood, who, in no conventional sense, had been speeding the parting guest, ran up-stairs again to Diana's room.

"She's gone?" said Diana, faintly. She was standing by the window. As she spoke the carriage came into view at a bend of the drive and disappeared into the trees beyond. Mrs. Colwood saw her shiver.

"Did she leave you her address?"

"Yes. Don't think any more about her. I have something to tell you."

Diana's painful start was the measure of her state. Muriel Colwood put her arms tenderly round the slight form.

"Mr. Marsham will be here directly. He came last night--too late--I would not let him see you. Ah!" She released Diana, and made a rapid step to the window. "There he is!--coming by the fields."

Diana sat down, as though her limbs trembled under her.

"Did you send for him?"

"Yes. You forgive me?"

"Then--he hasn't got my letter."

She said it without looking up, as though to herself.

Mrs. Colwood knelt down beside her.

"It is right he should be here," she said, with energy, almost with command; "it is the right, natural thing."

Diana stooped, mechanically, and kissed her; then sprang up, quivering, the color rushing into her cheeks. "Why, he mayn't even know!" She threw a piteous look at her companion.

"He does know, dear--he does know."

Diana composed herself. She lifted her hands to a tress of hair that was unfastened, and put it in its place. Instinctively she straightened her belt, her white collar. Mrs. Colwood noticed that she was in black again, in one of the dresses of her mourning.

* * * * *

When Marsham turned, at the sound of the latch, to see Diana coming in, all the man's secret calculations and revolts were for the moment scattered and drowned in sheer pity and dismay. In a few short hours can grief so work on youth? He ran to her, but she held up a hand which arrested him half-way. Then she closed the door, but still stood near it, as though she feared to move, or speak, looking at him with her appealing eyes.

"Oliver!"

He held out his hands.

"My poor, poor darling!"

She gave a little cry, as though some tension broke. Her lips almost smiled; but she held him away from her.

"You're not--not ashamed of me?"

His protests were the natural, the inevitable protests that any man with red blood in his veins must need have uttered, brought face to face with so much sorrow and so much beauty. She let him make them, while her left hand gently stroked and caressed his right hand which held hers; yet all the time resolutely turning her face and her soft breast away, as though she dreaded to be kissed, to lose will and identity in the mere delight of his touch. And he felt, too, in some strange way, as though the blow that had fallen upon her had placed her at a distance from him; not disgraced--but consecrate.

"Will you please sit down and let us talk?" she said, after a moment, withdrawing herself.

She pushed a chair forward, and sat down herself. The tears were in her eyes, but she brushed them away unconsciously.

"If papa had told me!" she said, in a low voice--"if he had only told me--before he died."

"It was out of love," said Marsham; "but yes--it would have been wiser--kinder--to have spoken."

She started.

"Oh no--not that. But we might have sorrowed--together. And he was always alone--he bore it all alone--even when he was dying."

"But you, dearest, shall not bear it alone!" cried Marsham, finding her hand again and kissing it. "My first task shall be to comfort you--to make you forget."

He thought she winced at the word "forget."

"When did you first guess--or know?"

He hesitated--then thought it best to tell the truth.

"When we were in the lime-walk."

"When you asked--her name? I remember"--her voice broke--"how you wrung my hand! And you never had any suspicion before?"

"Never. And it makes no difference, Diana--to you and me--none. I want you to understand that now--at once."

She looked at him, smiling tremulously. His words became him; even in her sorrow her eyes delighted in his shrewd thin face; in the fair hair, prematurely touched with gray, and lying heavily on the broad brow; in the intelligence and distinction of his whole aspect.

"You are so good to me--" she said, with a little sob. "No--no!--please, dear Oliver!--we have so much to talk of." And again she prevented him from taking her in his arms. "Tell me"--she laid her hand on his persuasively: "Sir James, of course, knew from the beginning?"

"Yes--from the beginning--that first night at Tallyn. He is coming down this afternoon, dearest. He knew you would want to see him. But it may not be till late."

"After all, I know so little yet," she said, bewildered. "Only--only what Fanny told me."

"What made her tell you?"

"She was angry with me--I forget about what. I did not understand at first what she was saying. Oliver"--she grasped his hand tightly, while the lids dropped over the eyes, as though she would shut out even his face as she asked her question--"is it true that--that--the death sentence--"

"Yes," said Marsham, reluctantly. "But it was at once commuted. And three weeks after the sentence she was released. She lived, Sir James tells me, nearly two months after your father brought her home."

"I wrote last night to the lawyers"--Diana breathed it almost in a whisper. "I am sure there is a letter for me--I am sure papa wrote."

"Promise me one thing!" said Marsham. "If they send you newspapers--for my sake, don't read them. Sir James will tell you, this afternoon, things the public have never known--facts which would certainly have altered the verdict if the jury had known. Your poor mother struck the blow in what was practically an impulse of self-defence, and the evidence which mainly convicted her was perjured evidence, as the liar who gave it confessed years afterward. Sir James will tell you that. He has the confession."

Her face relaxed, her mouth trembled violently.

"Oh, Oliver!--Oliver!" She was unable to bear the relief his words brought her: she broke down under it.

He caught her in his arms at last, and she gave way--she let herself be weak--and woman. Clinging to him with all the pure passion of a woman and all the trust of a child, she felt his kisses on her cheek, and her deep sobs shook her upon his breast. Marsham's being was stirred to its depths. He gave her the best he had to give; and in that moment of mortal appeal on her side and desperate pity on his, their natures met in that fusion of spirit and desire wherewith love can lend even tragedy and pain to its own uses.

* * * * *

And yet--and yet!--was it in that very moment that feeling--on the man's side--"o'erleaped itself, and fell on the other"? When they resumed conversation, Marsham's tacit expectation was that Diana would now show herself comforted; that, sure of him and of his affection, she would now be ready to put the tragic past aside; to think first and foremost of her own present life and his, and face the future cheerfully. A misunderstanding arose between them, indeed, which is, perhaps, one of the typical misunderstandings between men and women. The man, impatient of painful thoughts and recollections, eager to be quit of them as weakening and unprofitable, determined to silence them by the pleasant clamor of his own ambitions and desires; the woman, priestess of the past, clinging to all the pieties of memory, in terror lest she forget the dead, feeling it a disloyalty even to draw the dagger from the wound--between these two figures and dispositions there is a deep and natural antagonism.

It showed itself rapidly in the case of Marsham and Diana; for their moment of high feeling was no sooner over, and she sitting quietly again, her hand in his, the blinding tears dashed away, than Marsham's mind flew inevitably to his own great sacrifice. She must be comforted, indeed, poor child! yet he could not but feel that he, too, deserved consolation, and that his own most actual plight was no less worthy of her thoughts than the ghastly details of a tragedy twenty years old.

Yet she seemed to have forgotten Lady Lucy!--to have no inkling of the real situation. And he could find no way in which to break it.

For, in little broken sentences of horror and recollection, she kept going back to her mother's story--her father's silence and suffering. It was as though her mind could not disentangle itself from the load which had been flung upon it--could not recover its healthiness of action amid the phantom sights and sounds which beset imagination. Again and again she must ask him for details--and shrink from the answers; must hide her eyes with the little moan that wrung his heart; and break out in ejaculations, as though of bewilderment, under a revelation so singular and so terrible.

It was to be expected, of course; he could only hope it would soon pass. Secretly, after a time, he was repelled and wearied. He answered her with the same tender words, he tried to be all kindness; but more perfunctorily. The oneness of that supreme moment vanished and did not return.

Meanwhile, Diana's perceptions, stunned by the one overmastering thought, gave her no warning. And, in truth, if Marsham could have understood, the process of mental recovery was set going in her by just this freedom of utterance to the man she loved--these words and looks and tears--that brought ease after the dumb horror of the first hours.

At last he made an effort, hiding the nascent impatience in a caress.

"If I could only persuade you not to dwell upon it too persistently--to put it from your thoughts as soon and as much as you can! Dear, we shall have our own anxieties!"

She looked up with a sudden start.

"My mother," he said, reluctantly, "may give us trouble."

The color rushed into Diana's cheeks, and ebbed with equal suddenness.

"Lady Lucy! Oh!--how could I forget? Oliver!--she thinks--I am not fit!"

And in her eyes he saw for the first time the self-abasement he had dreaded, yet perhaps expected, to see there before. For in her first question to him there had been no real doubt of him; it had been the natural humility of wounded love that cries out, expecting the reply that no power on earth could check itself from giving were the case reversed.

"Dearest! you know my mother's bringing up: her Quaker training, and her rather stern ideas. We shall persuade her--in time."

"In time? And now--she--she forbids it?"

Her voice faltered. And yet, unconsciously, she had drawn herself a little together and away.

Marsham began to give a somewhat confused and yet guarded account of his mother's state of mind, endeavoring to prepare her for the letter which might arrive on the morrow. He got up and moved about the room as he spoke, while Diana sat, looking at him, her lips trembling from time to time. Presently he mentioned Ferrier's name, and Diana started.

"Does _he_ think it would do you harm--that you ought to give me up?"

"Not he! And if anybody can make my mother hear reason, it will be Ferrier."

"Lady Lucy believes it would injure you in Parliament?" faltered Diana.

"No, I don't believe she does. No sane person could."

"Then it's because--of the disgrace? Oliver!--perhaps--you ought to give me up?"

She breathed quick. It stabbed him to see the flush in her cheeks contending with the misery in her eyes. She could not pose, or play a part. What she could not hide from him was just the conflict between her love and her new-born shame. Before that scene on the hill there would have been her girlish dignity also to reckon with. But the greater had swallowed up the less; and from her own love--in innocent and simple faith--she imagined his.

So that when she spoke of his giving her up, it was not her pride that spoke, but only and truly her fear of doing him a hurt--by which she meant a hurt in public estimation or repute. The whole business side of the matter was unknown to her. She had never speculated on his circumstances, and she was constitutionally and rather proudly indifferent to questions of money. Vaguely, of course, she knew that the Marshams were rich and that Tallyn was Lady Lucy's. Beyond, she had never inquired.

This absence of all self-love in her attitude--together with her complete ignorance of the calculation in which she was involved--touched him sharply. It kept him silent about the money; it seemed impossible to speak of it. And yet all the time the thought of it clamored--perhaps increasingly--in his own mind.

He told her that they must stand firm--that she must be patient--that Ferrier would work for them--and Lady Lucy would come round. And she, loving him more and more with every word, seeing in him a god of consolation and of chivalry, trusted him wholly. It was characteristic of her that she did not attempt heroics for the heroics' sake; there was no idea of renouncing him with a flourish of trumpets. He said he loved her, and she believed him. But her heart went on its knees to him in a gratitude that doubled love, even in the midst of her aching bewilderment and pain.

* * * * *

He made her come out with him before luncheon; he talked with her of politics and their future; he did his best to scatter the nightmare in which she moved.

But after awhile he felt his efforts fail. The scenes that held her mind betrayed themselves in her recurrent pallor, the trembling of her hand in his, her piteous, sudden looks. She did not talk of her mother, but he could not presently rouse her to talk of anything else; she sat silent in her chair, gazing before her, her slender hands on her knee, dreaming and forlorn.

Then he remembered, and with involuntary relief, that he must get back to town, and to the House, for an important division. He told her, and she made no protest. Evidently she was already absorbed in the thought of Sir James Chide's visit. But when the time came for him to go she let herself be kissed, and then, as he was moving away, she caught his hand, and held it wildly to her lips.

"Oh, if you hadn't come!--if you hadn't come!" Her tears fell on the hand.

"But I did come!" he said, caressing her. "I was here last night--did Mrs. Colwood tell you? Afterward--in the dark--I walked up to the hill, only to look down upon this house, that held you."

"If I had known," she murmured, on his breast, "I should have slept."

He went--in exaltation; overwhelmed by her charm even in this eclipse of grief, and by the perception of her passion.

But before he was half-way to London he felt that he had been rather foolish and quixotic in not having told her simply and practically what his mother's opposition meant. She must learn it some day; better from him than others. His mother, indeed, might tell her in the letter she had threatened to write. But he thought not. Nobody was more loftily secret as to business affairs than Lady Lucy; money might not have existed for the rare mention she made of it. No; she would base her opposition on other grounds.

These reflections brought him back to earth, and to the gloomy pondering of the situation. Half a million!--because of the ill-doing of a poor neurotic woman--twenty years ago!

It filled him with a curious resentment against Juliet Sparling herself, which left him still more out of sympathy with Diana's horror and grief. It must really be understood, when they married, that Mrs. Sparling's name was never to be mentioned between them--that the whole grimy business was buried out of sight forever.

And with a great and morbid impatience he shook the recollection from him. The bustle of Whitehall, as he drove down it, was like wine in his veins; the crowd and the gossip of the Central Lobby, as he pressed his way through to the door of the House of Commons, had never been so full of stimulus or savor. In this agreeable, exciting world he knew his place; the relief was enormous; and, for a time, Marsham was himself again.

* * * * *

Sir James Chide came in the late afternoon; and in her two hours with him, Diana learned, from lips that spared her all they could, the heart-breaking story of which Fanny had given her but the crudest outlines.

The full story, and its telling, taxed the courage both of hearer and speaker. Diana bore it, as it seemed to Sir James, with the piteous simplicity of one in whose nature grief had no pretences to overcome. The iron entered into her soul, and her quick imagination made her torment. But her father had taught her lessons of self-conquest, and in this first testing of her youth she did not fail. Sir James was astonished at the quiet she was able to maintain, and touched to the heart by the suffering she could not conceal.

Nothing was said of his own relation to her mother's case; but he saw that she understood it, and their hearts moved together. When he rose to take his leave she held his hand in hers with such a look in her eyes as a daughter might have worn; and he, with an emotion to which he gave little outward expression, vowed to himself that henceforward she should lack no fatherly help or counsel that he could give her.

He gathered, with relief, that the engagement persisted, and the perception led him to praise Marsham in a warm Irish way. But he could not find anything hopeful to say of Lady Lucy. "If you only hold to each other, my dear young lady, things will come right!" Diana flushed and shrank a little, and he felt--helplessly--that the battle was for their fighting, and not his.

Meanwhile, as he had seen Mr. Riley, he did his best to prepare her for the letters and enclosures, which had been for twenty years in the custody of the firm, and would reach her on the morrow.

But what he did not prepare her for was the letter from Lady Lucy Marsham which reached Beechcote by the evening post, after Sir James had left.

The letter lay awhile on Diana's knee, unopened. Muriel Colwood, glancing at her, went away with the tears in her eyes, and at last the stumbling fingers broke the seal.

"MY DEAR MISS MALLORY,--I want you to understand why it is that I must oppose your marriage with my son. You know well, I think, how gladly I should have welcomed you as a daughter but for this terrible revelation. As it is, I cannot consent to the engagement, and if it is carried out Oliver must renounce the inheritance of his father's fortune. I do not say this as any vulgar threat. It is simply that I cannot allow my husband's wealth to be used in furthering what he would never have permitted. He had--and so have I--the strongest feeling as to the sacredness of the family and its traditions. He held, as I do, that it ought to be founded in mutual respect and honor, and that children should have round about them the help that comes from the memory of unstained and God-fearing ancestors. Do you not also feel this? Is it not a great principle, to which personal happiness and gratification may justly be sacrificed? And would not such a sacrifice bring with it the highest happiness of all?

"Do not think that I am cruel or hard-hearted. I grieve for you with all my soul, and I have prayed for you earnestly, though, perhaps, you will consider this mere hypocrisy. But I must first think of my son--and of my husband. Very possibly you and Oliver may disregard what I say. But if so, I warn you that Oliver is not indifferent to money, simply because the full development of his career depends on it. He will regret what he has done, and your mutual happiness will be endangered. Moreover, he shrinks from all painful thoughts and associations; he seems to have no power to bear them; yet how can you protect him from them?

"I beg you to be counselled in time, to think of him rather than yourself--if, indeed, you care for him. And should you decide rightly, an old woman's love and gratitude will be yours as long as she lives.

"Believe me, dear Miss Mallory, very sincerely yours,

"LUCY MARSHAM."

Diana dragged herself up-stairs and locked her door. At ten o'clock Mrs. Colwood knocked, and heard a low voice asking to be left alone. She went away wondering, in her astonishment and terror, what new blow had fallen. No sound reached her during the night--except the bluster of a north wind rushing in great gusts upon the hill-side and the woods.