“I don’t regret it for myself.”  Pshaw!  What was there to choose between him and his mother?  There, on his writing-table, lay a number of recent bills, and some correspondence as to a Scotch moor he had persuaded his mother to take for the coming season.  There was now to be an end, he supposed, to the expenditure which the bills represented, and an end to expensive moors.  “I don’t regret it for myself.”  Damned humbug!  When did any man, brought up in wealth, make the cold descent to poverty and self-denial without caring?  Yet he let the sentence stand.  He was too sleepy, too inert, to rewrite it.

And how cold were all his references to the catastrophe!  He groaned as he thought of Diana—­as though he actually saw the vulture gnawing at the tender breast.  Had she slept?—­had the tears stopped?  Let him tear up the beastly thing, and begin again!

No.  His head fell forward on his arm.  Some dull weight of character—­of disillusion—­interposed.  He could do no better.  He shut, stamped, and posted what he had written.

* * * * *

At mid-day, in her Brookshire village, Diana received the letter—­with another from London, in a handwriting she did not know.

When she had read Marsham’s it dropped from her hand.  The color flooded her cheeks—­as though the heart leaped beneath a fresh blow which it could not realize or measure.  Was it so she would have written to Oliver if—­

She was sitting at her writing-table in the drawing-room.  Her eyes wandered through the mullioned window beside her to the hill-side and the woods.  This was Wednesday.  Four days since, among those trees, Oliver had spoken to her.  During those four days it seemed to her that, in the old Hebrew phrase, she had gone down into the pit.  All the nameless dreads and terrors of her youth, all the intensified fears of the last few weeks, had in a few minutes become real and verified—­only in a shape infinitely more terrible than any fear among them all had ever dared to prophesy.  The story of her mother—­the more she knew of it, the more she realized it, the more sharply it bit into the tissues of life; the more it seemed to set Juliet Sparling and Juliet Sparling’s child alone by themselves—­in a dark world.  Diana had never yet had the courage to venture out-of-doors since the news came to her; she feared to see even her old friends the Roughsedges, and had been invisible to them since the Saturday; she feared even the faces of the village children.

All through she seemed to have been clinging to Marsham’s supporting hand as to the clew which might—­when nature had had its way—­lead her back out of this labyrinth of pain.  But surely he would let her sorrow awhile!—­would sorrow with her.  Under the strange coldness and brevity of his letter, she felt like the children in the market-place of old—­“We have mourned unto you, and ye have not wept.”