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.