She stroked her friend’s hand piteously.  Mrs. Roughsedge, foreseeing the storm of gossip that would be sweeping in a day or two through the village and the neighborhood, could not command herself to speak.  Her questions—­her indignation—­choked her.  At the end of the conversation, when Diana had described such plans as she had, and the elder lady rose to go, she said, faltering: 

“May Hugh come and say good-bye?”

Diana shrank a moment, and then assented.  Mrs. Roughsedge folded the girl to her heart, and fairly broke down.  Diana comforted her; but it seemed as if her own tears were now dry.  When they were parting, she called her friend back a moment.

“I think,” she said, steadily, “it would be best now that everybody here should know what my name was, and who I am.  Will you tell the Vicar, and anybody else you think of?  I shall come back to live here.  I know everybody will be kind—­” Her voice died away.

The March sun had set and the lamps were lit when Hugh Roughsedge entered the drawing-room where Diana sat writing letters, paying bills, absorbing herself in all the details of departure.  The meeting between them was short.  Diana was embarrassed, above all, by the tumult of suppressed feeling she divined in Roughsedge.  For the first time she must perforce recognize what hitherto she had preferred not to see:  what now she was determined not to know.  The young soldier, on his side, was stifled by his own emotions—­wrath—­contempt—­pity; and by a maddening desire to wrap this pale stricken creature in his arms, and so protect her from an abominable world.  But something told him—­to his despair—­that she had been in Marsham’s arms; had given her heart irrevocably; and that, Marsham’s wife or no, all was done and over for him, Hugh Roughsedge.

Yet surely in time—­in time!  That was the inner clamor of the mind, as he bid her good-bye, after twenty minutes’ disjointed talk, in which, finally, neither dared to go beyond commonplace.  Only at the last, as he held her hand, he asked her: 

“I may write to you from Nigeria?”

Rather shyly, she assented; adding, with a smile: 

“But I am a bad letter-writer!”

“You are an angel!” he said, hoarsely, lifted her hand, kissed it, and rushed away.

She was shaken by the scene, and had hardly composed herself again to a weary grappling with business when the front door bell rang once more, and the butler appeared.

“Mr. Lavery wishes to know, miss, if you will see him.”

The Vicar!  Diana’s heart sank.  Must she?  But some deep instinct—­some yearning—­interfered, and she bade him be admitted.

Then she stood waiting, dreading some onslaught on the secrets of her mind and heart—­some presumption in the name of religion.

The tall form entered, in the close-buttoned coat, the gaunt oblong of the face poked forward, between the large protruding ears, the spectacled eyes blinking.