As she passed through the village she fell in with the Roughsedges:  the doctor, with his wide-awake on the back of his head, a book and a bulging umbrella under his arm; Mrs. Roughsedge, in a new shawl, and new bonnet-strings, with a prodigal flutter of side curls beside her ample countenance.  Hugh, it appeared, was expected by an evening train.  Diana begged that he might be brought up to see her some time in the course of the following afternoon.  Then she drove on, and Mrs. Roughsedge was left staring discontentedly at her husband.

“I think she was glad, Henry?”

“Think it, my dear, if it does you any good,” said the doctor, cheerfully.

* * * * *

When Diana reached home night had fallen—­a moon-lit night, through which all the shapes and even the colors of day were still to be seen or divined in a softened and pearly mystery.  Muriel Colwood was not at home.  She had gone to town, on one of her rare absences, to meet some relations.  Diana missed her, and yet was conscious that even the watch of those kind eyes would—­to-night—­have added to the passionate torment of thought.

As she sat alone in the drawing-room after her short and solitary meal her nature bent and trembled under the blowing of those winds of fate, which, like gusts among autumn trees, have tested or strained or despoiled the frail single life since time began; winds of love and pity, of desire and memory, of anguish and of longing.

Only her dog kept her company.  Sometimes she rose out of restlessness, and moved about the room, and the dog’s eyes would follow her, dumbly dependent.  The room was dimly lit; in the mirrors she saw now and then the ghostly passage of some one who seemed herself and not herself.  The windows were open to a misty garden, waiting for moonrise; in the house all was silence; only from the distant road and village came voices sometimes of children, or the sounds of a barrel-organ, fragmentary and shrill.

Loneliness ached in her heart—­spoke to her from the future.  And five miles away Oliver, too, was lonely—­and in pain. Pain!—­the thought of it, as of something embodied and devilish, clutching and tearing at a man already crushed and helpless—­gave her no respite.  The tears ran down her cheeks as she moved to and fro, her hands at her breast.

Yet she was helpless.  What could she do?  Even if he were free from Alicia, even if he wished to recall her, how could he—­maimed and broken—­take the steps that could alone bring her to his side?  If their engagement had subsisted, horror, catastrophe, the approach of death itself, could have done nothing to part them.  Now, how was a man in such a plight to ask from a woman what yet the woman would pay a universe to give?  And in the face of the man’s silence, how could the woman speak?