Beside a passion so absolute and so piteous he felt, his own claim shrink into nothingness—­impossible, even, to give it voice again.  He straightened himself in silence; with an effort of the whole man, the lover put on the friend.

“But you can go,” he said, a little hoarsely, “if you feel like that.”

She raised herself suddenly.

“How do I know that he wants me?—­how do I know that he would even see me?”

Once more her cheeks were crimson.  She had shown him her love unveiled; now he was to see her doubt—­the shame that tormented her.  He felt that it was to heal him she had spoken, and he could do nothing to repay her.  He could neither chide her for a quixotic self-sacrifice, which might never be admitted or allowed; nor protest, on Marsham’s behalf, against it, for he knew, in truth, nothing of the man; least of all could he plead for himself.  He could only sit, staring like a fool, tongue-tied; till Diana, mastering, for his sake, the emotion to which, partly also for his sake, she had given rein, gradually led the conversation back to safer and cooler ground.  All the little involuntary arts came in by which a woman regains command of herself, and thereby of her companion.  Her hat tired her head; she removed it, and the beautiful hair underneath, falling into confusion, must be put in its place by skilled instinctive fingers, every movement answering to a similar self-restraining effort in the mind within.  She dried her tears; she drew closer the black scarf round the shoulders of her white dress; she straightened the violets at her belt—­Muriel’s mid-day gift—­till he beheld her, white and suffering indeed, but lovely and composed—­queen of herself.

She made him talk of his adventures, and he obeyed her, partly to help her in the struggle he perceived, partly because in the position—­beneath and beyond all hope—­to which she had reduced him, it was the only way by which he could save anything out of the wreck.  And she bravely responded.  She could and did lend him enough of her mind to make it worth his while.  A friend should not come home to her from perils of land and sea, and find her ungrateful—­a niggard of sympathy and praise.

So that when Dr. and Mrs. Roughsedge appeared, and Muriel returned with them, Mrs. Roughsedge, all on edge with anxiety, could make very little of what had—­what must have—­occurred.  Diana, carved in white wax, but for the sensitive involuntary movements of lip and eyebrow, was listening to a description of an English embassy sent through the length and breadth of the most recently conquered province of Nigeria.  The embassy took the news of peace and Imperial rule to a country devastated the year before by the most hideous of slave-raids.  The road it marched by was strewn with the skeletons of slaves—­had been so strewn probably for thousands of years.  “One night my horse trod unawares on two skeletons—­women—­locked in each other’s arms,” said Hugh; “scores of others round them.  In the evening we camped at a village where every able-bodied male had been killed the year before.”