“He wanted something—­and I could not give it him—­could not even tell what it was.  It was misery!  One day he managed to write:  ’If you are in trouble, go to Riley & Bonner—­ask them.’  They were his solicitors, whom he had depended on from his boyhood.  But since his death I have never wanted anything from them but a little help in business.  They have been very good; but—­I could not go and question them.  If there was anything to know—­papa had not been able to tell me—­I did not want anybody else—­to—­”

Her voice dropped.  Only half an hour since the flowering of life!  What a change in both!  She was pacing along slowly, her head thrown back; the oval of her face white among her furs, under the ghostly touch of the moonlight; a suggestion of something austere—­finely remote—­in her attitude and movement.  His eyes were on the ground, his shoulders bent; she could not see his face.

“We must try and unravel it—­together,” he said, at last, with an effort.  “Can you tell me your mother’s name?”

“It was an old Staffordshire family.  But she and papa met in America, and they married there.  Her father died not long afterward, I think.  And I have never heard of any relations but the one sister, Mrs. Merton.  Her name was Wentworth.  Oh!” It was an involuntary cry of physical pain.

“Diana!—­Did I hurt your hand? my darling!”

The sudden tightness of his grip had crushed her fingers.  She smiled at him, as he kissed them, in hasty remorse.

“And her Christian name?” he asked, in a low voice.

“Juliet.”

There was a pause.  They had turned back, and were walking toward the house.  The air had grown much colder; frosty stars were twinkling, and a chilly wind was blowing light clouds across the moon.  The two figures moved slowly in and out of the bands of light and shadow which crossed the avenue.

Diana stopped suddenly.

“If there were something terrible to know!”—­she said, trembling—­“something which would make you ashamed of me!—­”

Her tall slenderness bent toward him—­she held out her hands piteously.  Marsham’s manhood asserted itself.  He encircled her again with his strong arm, and she hid her face against him.  The contact of her soft body, her fresh cheek, intoxicated him afresh.  In the strength of his desire for her, it was as though he were fighting off black vultures of the night, forces of horror that threatened them both.  He would not believe what yet he already knew to be true.  The thought of his mother clamored at the door of his mind, and he would not open to it.  In a reckless defiance of what had overtaken him, he poured out tender and passionate speech which gradually stilled the girl’s tumult of memory and foreboding, and brought back the heaven of their first moment on the hill-side.  Her own reserve broke down, and from her murmured words, her sweetness, her infinite gratitude, Marsham might divine still more fully the richness of that harvest which such a nature promised to a lover.