Sir James questioned her kindly, but discreetly.  This was really her first visit to Brookshire?

“To England!” said Diana; and then, on a little wooing, came out the girl’s first impressions, natural, enthusiastic, gay.  Sir James listened, with eyes half-closed, following every movement of her lips, every gesture of head and hand.

“Your parents took you abroad quite as a child?”

“I went with my father.  My mother died when I was quite small.”

Sir James did not speak for a moment.  At last he said: 

“But before you went abroad, you lived in London?”

“Yes—­in Kensington Square.”

Sir James made a sudden movement which displaced a book on a little table beside him.  He stooped to pick it up.

“And your father was tired of England?”

Diana hesitated—­

“I—­I think he had gone through great trouble.  He never got over mamma’s death.”

“Oh yes, I see,” said Sir James, gently.  Then, in another tone: 

“So you settled on that beautiful coast?  I wonder if that was the winter I first saw Italy?”

He named the year.

“Yes—­that was the year,” said Diana.  “Had you never seen Italy before that?” She looked at him in a little surprise.

“Do I seem to you so old?” said Sir James, smiling.  “I had been a very busy man, Miss Mallory, and my holidays had been generally spent in Ireland.  But that year”—­he paused a moment—­“that year I had been ill, and the doctors sent me abroad—­in October,” he added, slowly and precisely.  “I went first to Paris, and I was at Genoa in November.”

“We must have been there—­just about then!  Mamma died in October.  And I remember the winter was just beginning at Genoa—­it was very cold—­and I got bronchitis—­I was only a little thing.”

“And Oliver tells me you found a home at Portofino?”

Diana replied.  He kept her talking; yet her impression was that he did not listen very much to what she said.  At the same time she felt herself studied, in a way which made her self-conscious, which perhaps she might have resented in any man less polished and less courteous.

“Pardon me—­” he said, abruptly, at a pause in the conversation.  “Your name interests me particularly.  It is Welsh, is it not?  I knew two or three persons of that name; and they were Welsh.”

Diana’s look changed a little.

“Yes, it is Welsh,” she said, in a hesitating, reserved voice; and then looked round her as though in search of a change of topic.

Sir James bent forward.

“May I come and see you some day at Beechcote?”

Diana flushed with surprise and pleasure.

“Oh!  I should be so honored!”

“The honor would be mine,” he said, with pleasant deference.  “Now I think I see that Marsham is wroth with me for monopolizing you like this.”

He rose and walked away, just as Marsham brought up Mr. Barton to introduce him to Diana.