That was a strange walk together for these two!  Side by side, almost in silence, they followed the garden path which had taken them to the downs, on a certain February evening.  The thought of it hovered, a ghost unlaid, in both their minds.  Instinctively, Marsham guided her by this path, that they might avoid that spot on the farther lawn, where the scattered chairs, the trampled books and papers still showed where Death and Sleep had descended.  Yet, as they passed it from a distance he saw the natural shudder run through her; and, by association, there flashed through him intolerably the memory of that moment of divine abandonment in their last interview, when he had comforted her, and she had clung to him.  And now, how near she was to him—­and yet how infinitely remote!  She walked beside him, her step faltering now and then, her head thrown back, as though she craved for air and coolness on her brow and tear-stained eyes.  He could not flatter himself that his presence disturbed her, that she was thinking at all about him.  As for him, his mind, held as it still was in the grip of catastrophe, and stunned by new compunctions, was still susceptible from time to time of the most discordant and agitating recollections—­memories glancing, lightning-quick, through the mind, unsummoned and shattering.  Her face in the moonlight, her voice in the great words of her promise—­“all that a woman can!”—­that wretched evening in the House of Commons when he had finally deserted her—­a certain passage with Alicia, in the Tallyn woods—­these images quivered, as it were, through nerve and vein, disabling and silencing him.

But presently, to his astonishment, Diana began to talk, in her natural voice, without a trace of preoccupation or embarrassment.  She poured out her latest recollections of Ferrier.  She spoke, brushing away her tears sometimes, of his visit in the morning, and his talk as he lay beside them on the grass—­his recent letters to her—­her remembrance of him in Italy.

Marsham listened in silence.  What she said was new to him, and often bitter.  He had known nothing of this intimate relation which had sprung up so rapidly between her and Ferrier.  While he acknowledged its beauty and delicacy, the very thought of it, even at this moment, filled him with an irritable jealousy.  The new bond had arisen out of the wreck of those he had himself broken; Ferrier had turned to her, and she to Ferrier, just as he, by his own acts, had lost them both; it might be right and natural; he winced under it—­in a sense, resented it—­none the less.

And all the time he never ceased to be conscious of the newspaper in his breast-pocket, and of that faint pencilled line that seemed to burn against his heart.

Would she shrink from him, finally and irrevocably, if she knew it?  Once or twice he looked at her curiously, wondering at the power that women have of filling and softening a situation.  Her broken talk of Ferrier was the only possible talk that could have arisen between them at that moment without awkwardness, without risk.  To that last ground of friendship she could still admit him, and a wounded self-love suggested that she chose it for his sake as well as Ferrier’s.