So she watched with Oliver, as once—­at the moment of her sharpest pain—­he had watched with her.  But whereas in that earlier night everything was in the man’s hands to will or to do, the woman felt herself now helpless and impotent.  His wealth, his mother hedged him from her.  And if not, he had forgotten her altogether for Alicia; he cared for her no more; it would merely add to his burden to be reminded of her.  As to Alicia—­the girl who could cruelly leave him there, in that house of torture, to go and dance and amuse herself—­leave him in his pain, his mother in her sorrow—­Diana’s whole being was shaken first with an anguish of resentful scorn, in which everything personal to herself disappeared.  Then—­by an immediate revulsion—­the thought of Alicia was a thought of deliverance.  Gone?—­gone from between them?—­the flaunting, triumphant, heartless face?

Suddenly it seemed to Diana that she was there beside him, in the darkened room—­that he heard her, and looked up.

“Diana!”

“Oliver!” She knelt beside him—­she raised his head on her breast—­she whispered to him; and at last he slept.  Then hostile forms crowded about her, forbidding her, driving her away—­even Sir James Chide—­in the name of her own youth.  And she heard her own answer:  “Dear friend!—­think!—­remember!  Let me stay!—­let me stay!  Am I not the child of sorrow?  Here is my natural place—­my only joy.”

And she broke down into bitter helpless tears, pleading, it seemed, with things and persons inexorable.

* * * * *

Meanwhile, in Beechcote village, that night, a man slept lightly, thinking of Diana.  Hugh Roughsedge, bronzed and full of honors, a man developed and matured, with the future in his hands, had returned that afternoon to his old home.

CHAPTER XXIII

“How is she?”

Mrs. Colwood shook her head sadly.

“Not well—­and not happy.”

The questioner was Hugh Roughsedge.  The young soldier had walked up to Beechcote immediately after luncheon, finding it impossible to restrain his impatience longer.  Diana had not expected him so soon, and had slipped out for her daily half-hour with Betty Dyson, who had had a slight stroke, and was failing fast.  So that Mrs. Colwood was at Roughsedge’s discretion.  But he was not taking all the advantage of it that he might have done.  The questions with which his mind was evidently teeming came out but slowly.

Little Mrs. Colwood surveyed him from time to time with sympathy and pleasure.  Her round child-like eyes under their long lashes told her everything that as a woman she wanted to know.  What an improvement in looks and manner—­what indefinable gains in significance and self-possession!  Danger, command, responsibility, those great tutors of men, had come in upon the solid yet malleable stuff of which the character was made, moulding and polishing, striking away defects, disengaging and accenting qualities.  Who could ever have foreseen that Hugh might some day be described as “a man of the world”?  Yet if that vague phrase were to be taken in its best sense, as describing a personality both tempered and refined by the play of the world’s forces upon it, it might certainly be now used of the man before her.