Yet the two men loved, respected, and understood each other.  Diana wondered secretly, indeed, whether Sir James could have explained to her the bond between Ferrier and Lady Lucy.  That, to her inexperience, was a complete mystery!  Almost every day Ferrier wrote to Tallyn, and twice a week at least, as the letters were delivered at table d’hote, Diana could not help seeing the long pointed writing on the thin black-edged paper which had once been for her the signal of doom.  She hardly suspected, indeed, how often she herself made the subject of the man’s letters.  Ferrier wrote of her persistently to Lady Lucy, being determined that so much punishment at least should be meted out to that lady.  The mistress of Tallyn, on her side, never mentioned the name of Miss Mallory.  All the pages in his letters which concerned her might never have been written, and he was well aware that not a word of them would ever reach Oliver.  Diana’s pale and saddened beauty; the dignity which grief, tragic grief, free from all sordid or ignoble elements, can infuse into a personality; the affection she inspired, the universal sympathy that was felt for her:  he dwelt on these things, till Lady Lucy, exasperated, could hardly bring herself to open the envelopes which contained his lucubrations.  Could any subject, in correspondence with herself, be more unfitting or more futile?—­and what difference could it all possibly make to the girl’s shocking antecedents?

* * * * *

One radiant afternoon, after a long day of sight-seeing, Diana and Mrs. Colwood retreated to their rooms to write letters and to rest; Forbes was hotly engaged in bargaining for an Umbrian primitif, which he had just discovered in an old house in a back street, whither, no doubt, the skilful antiquario had that morning transported it from his shop; and Sir James had gone out for a stroll, on the splendid road which winds gradually down the hill on which Perugia stands, to the tomb of the Volumnii, on the edge of the plain, and so on to Assisi and Foligno, in the blue distance.

Half-way down he met Ferrier, ascending from the tomb.  Sir James turned, and they strolled back together.  The Umbrian landscape girdling the superb town showed itself unveiled.  Every gash on the torn white sides of the eastern Apennines, every tint of purple or porcelain-blue on the nearer hills, every plane of the smiling valley as it wound southward, lay bathed in a broad and searching light which yet was a light of beauty—­of infinite illusion.

“I must say I have enjoyed my life,” said Ferrier, abruptly, as they paused to look back, “though I don’t put it altogether in the first class!”

Sir James raised his eyebrows—­smiled—­and did not immediately reply.

“Chide, old fellow,” Ferrier resumed, turning to him, “before I left England I signed my will.  Do you object that I have named you one of the two executors?”