be inquired; it is certain that if, all the while, in Oliver’s room, she and Lady Lucy had not been wrestling hour by hour with death—­or worse—­Diana would have wanted no one to open them.  When she did understand, there was no opposing her.  She pleaded—­not without tears—­to be given the happiness of knowing they were pledged, and her Muriel safe in harbor.  So Roughsedge had his say; a quiet engagement began its course in the world; Brookshire as yet knew nothing; and the doctor triumphed over Patricia.

During this time Sir James Chide watched the development of a situation he had not been able to change with a strange mixture of revolt and sympathy.  Sometimes he looked beyond the tragedy which he thought inevitable to a recovered and normal life for Diana; sometimes he felt a dismal certainty that when Oliver had left her, that recovered life could only shape itself to ascetic and self-renouncing ends.  Had she belonged to his own church, she would no doubt have become a “religious”; and he would have felt it the natural solution.  Outside the Catholic Church, the same need takes shape—­he thought—­in forms less suited to a woman’s weakness, less conducive to her dignity.

All through he resented the sacrifice of a being so noble, true, and tender to a love, in his eyes, so unfitting and derogatory.  Not all the pathos of suffering could blunt his sense of Marsham’s inferiority, or make him think it “worth while.”

Then, looking deeper, he saw the mother in the child; and in Diana’s devotion, mysterious influences, flowing from her mother’s fate—­from the agony, the sin, the last tremulous hope, and piteous submission of Juliet Sparling.  He perceived that in this broken, tortured happiness to which Diana had given herself there was some sustaining or consoling element that nothing more normal or more earthly would have brought her; he guessed at spiritual currents and forces linking the dead with the living, and at a soul heroically calm among them, sending forth rays into the darkness.  His religion, which was sincere, enabled him to understand her; his affection, his infinite delicacy of feeling, helped her.

Meanwhile, Diana and Lankester became the sustaining angels of a stricken house.  But not all their tenderness and their pity could, in the end, do much for the two sufferers they tried to comfort.  In Oliver’s case the spinal pain and disorganization increased, the blindness also; Lady Lucy became steadily feebler and more decrepit.  At last all life was centred on one hope—­the coming of a great French specialist, a disciple of Charcot’s, recommended by the English Ambassador in Paris, who was an old friend and kinsman of Lady Lucy.