“She died when I was only four.  I just remember—­it is almost my first recollection of anything—­seeing her carried up-stairs—­” She broke off.  “And oh! it’s so strange!—­”

“Strange?  She was ill?”

“Yes, but—­what I seem to remember never explains itself—­and I did not dare to ask papa.  She hadn’t been with us—­for a long time.  Papa and I had been alone.  Then one day I saw them carrying her up-stairs—­my father and two nurses—­I ran out before my nurse could catch me—­and saw her—­she was in her hat and cloak.  I didn’t know her, and when she called me, I ran away.  Then afterward they took me in to see her in bed—­two or three times—­and I remember once”—­Diana began to sob herself—­“seeing her cry.  She lay sobbing—­and my father beside her; he held her hand—­and I saw him hide his eyes upon it.  They never noticed me; I don’t know that they saw me.  Then they told me she was dead—­I saw her lying on the bed—­and my nurse gave me some flowers to put beside her—­some violets.  They were the only flowers.  I can see her still, lying there—­with her hands closed over them.”

She released herself from Marsham, and, with her hand in his, she drew him slowly along the path, while she went on speaking, with an effort indeed, yet with a marvellous sense of deliverance—­after the silence of years.  She described the entire seclusion of their life at Portofino.

“Papa never spoke to me of mamma, and I never remember a picture of her.  After his death I saw a closed locket on his breast for the first time.  I would not have opened it for the world—­I just kissed it—­” Her voice broke again; but after a moment she quietly resumed.  “He changed his name—­I think—­when I was about nine years old.  I remember that somehow it seemed to give him comfort—­he was more cheerful with me afterward—­”

“And you have no idea what led him to go abroad?”

She shook her head.  Marsham’s changed and rapid tone had betrayed some agitation in the mind behind; but Diana did not notice it.  In her story she had come to what, in truth, had been the determining and formative influence on her own life—­her father’s melancholy, and the mystery in which it had been enwrapped; and even the perceptions of love were for the moment blinded as the old tyrannous grief overshadowed her.

“His life”—­she said, slowly—­“seemed for years—­one long struggle to bear—­what was really—­unbearable.  Then when I was about nineteen there was a change.  He no longer shunned people quite in the same way, and he took me to Egypt and India.  We came across old friends of his whom I, of course, had never seen before; and I used to wonder at the way in which they treated him—­with a kind of reverence—­as though they would not have touched him roughly for the world.  Then directly after we got home to the Riviera his illness began—­”

She dwelt on the long days of dumbness, and her constant sense that he wished—­in vain—­to communicate something to her.