The intellect in Diana, the critical instinct resisted.  And, moreover, to have abandoned any fraction of the conservative and traditional beliefs in which she had been reared was impossible for her of all women; it would have seemed to her that she was thereby leaving those two suffering ones, whom only her love sheltered, still lonelier in death.  So, beneath the clatter of talk and opinion, run the deep omnipotent tides of our real being.

But if the mind resisted, the heart felt, and therewith, the soul—­that total personality which absorbs and transmutes the contradictions of life—­grew kinder and gentler within her.

One day, after a discussion on votes for women which had taken place beside Marion’s sofa, Diana, when the talkers were gone, had thrown herself on her friend.

“Dear, you can’t wish it!—­you can’t believe it!  To brutalize—­unsex us!”

Marion raised herself on her elbow, and looked down the narrow cross street beneath the windows of her lodging.  It was a stifling evening.  The street was strewn with refuse, the odors from it filled the room.  Ragged children with smeared faces were sitting or playing listlessly in the gutters.  The public-house at the corner was full of animation, and women were passing in and out.  Through the roar of traffic from the main street beyond a nearer sound persisted:  a note of wailing—­the wailing of babes.

“There are the unsexed!” said Marion, panting.  “Is their brutalization the price we pay for our refinement?” Then, as she sank back:  “Try anything—­everything—­to change that.”

Diana pressed the speaker’s hand to her lips.

But from Marion Vincent, the girl’s thoughts, as she wandered in the summer garden, had passed on to the news which Mrs. Roughsedge had brought her.  Oliver was speaking every night, almost, in the villages round Beechcote.  Last week he had spoken at Beechcote itself.  Since Mrs. Roughsedge’s visit, Diana had borrowed the local paper from Brown, and had read two of Oliver’s speeches therein reported.  As she looked up to the downs, or caught through the nearer trees the lines of distant woods, it was as though the whole scene—­earth and air—­were once more haunted for her by Oliver—­his presence—­his voice.  Beechcote lay on the high-road from Tallyn to Dunscombe, the chief town of the division.  Several times a week, at least, he must pass the gate.  At any moment they might meet face to face.

The sooner the better!  Unless she abandoned Beechcote, they must learn to meet on the footing of ordinary acquaintances; and it were best done quickly.

Voices on the lawn!  Diana, peeping through the trees, beheld the Vicar in conversation with Muriel Colwood.  She turned and fled, pausing at last in the deepest covert of the wood, breathless and a little ashamed.

She had seen him once since her return.  Everybody was so kind to her, the Vicar, the Miss Bertrams—­everybody; only the pity and the kindness burned so.  She wrestled with these feelings in the wood, but she none the less kept a thick screen between herself and Mr. Lavery.