Dear Hugh Roughsedge!—­he was indeed a faithful understanding friend.  She was proud of his letters; she was proud of his conduct in the short campaign just over; she looked forward to his return in the autumn.  But he must not cherish foolish thoughts or wishes.  She would never marry.  What Lady Lucy said was true.  She had probably no right to marry.  She stood apart.

But—­but—­she must not be asked yet to give herself to any great mission—­any set task of charity or philanthropy.  Her poor heart fluttered within her at the thought, and she clung gratefully to the recollection of Marion’s imperious words to her.  That exaltation with which, in February, she had spoken to the Vicar of going to the East End to work had dropped—­quite dropped.

Of course, there was a child in the village—­a dear child—­ill and wasting—­in a spinal jacket, for whom one would do anything—­just anything!  And there was Betty Dyson—­plucky, cheerful old soul.  But that was another matter.

What, she asked, had she to give the poor?  She wanted guiding and helping and putting in the right way herself.  She could not preach to any one—­wrestle with any one.  And ought one to make out of others’ woes plasters for one’s own?  To use the poor as the means of a spiritual “cure” seemed a dubious indecent thing; more than a touch in it of arrogance—­or sacrilege.

* * * * *

Meanwhile she had been fighting her fight in the old ways.  She had been falling back on her education, appealing to books and thought, reminding herself of what the life of the mind had been to her father in his misery, and of those means of cultivating it to which he would certainly have commended her.  She was trying to learn a new foreign language, and, under Marion Vincent’s urging, the table in the little sitting-room was piled with books on social and industrial matters, which she diligently read and pondered.

It was all struggle and effort.  But it had brought her some reward.  And especially through Marion Vincent’s letters, and through the long day with Marion in London, which she had now to look back upon.  For Miss Vincent and Frobisher had returned, and Marion was once more in her Stepney rooms.  She was apparently not much worse; would allow no talk about herself; and though she had quietly relinquished all her old activities, her room was still the centre it had long been for the London thinker and reformer.

Diana found there an infinity to learn.  The sages and saints, it seemed, are of all sides and all opinions.  That had not been the lesson of her youth.  In a comforting heat of prejudice her father had found relief from suffering, and his creeds had been fused with her young blood.  Lately she had seen their opposites embodied in a woman from whom she shrank in repulsion—­whose name never passed her lips—­Oliver’s sister—­who had trampled on her in her misery.  Yet here, in Marion’s dingy lodging, she saw the very same ideas which Isabel Fotheringham made hateful, clothed in light, speaking from the rugged or noble faces of men and women who saw in them the salvation of their kind.