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?