“At last you confess it!” cried Ferrier, as he carried off his papers.  But his gayety soon departed.  He stood awhile at the window in his room, looking out upon the sodden park—­a rather gray and sombre figure.  Over his ugly impressiveness a veil of weariness had dropped.  Politics and the strife of parties, the devices of enemies and the dissatisfaction of friends—­his soul was tired of them.  And the emergence of this possible love-affair—­for the moment, ardent and deep as were the man’s affections and sympathies, toward this Marsham household, it did but increase his sense of moral fatigue.  If the flutter in the blood—­and the long companionship of equal love—­if these were the only things of real value in life—­how had his been worth living?

CHAPTER V

The last covert had been shot, and as Marsham and his party, followed by scattered groups of beaters, turned homeward over the few fields that separated them from the park, figures appeared coming toward them in the rosy dusk—­Mr. Ferrier and Diana in front, with most of the other guests of the house in their train.  There was a merry fraternization between the two parties—­a characteristic English scene, in a characteristic setting:  the men in their tweed shooting-suits, some with their guns over their shoulders, for the most part young and tall, clean-limbed and clear-eyed, the well-to-do Englishman at his most English moment, and brimming with the joy of life; the girls dressed in the same tweed stuffs, and with the same skilled and expensive simplicity, but wearing, some of them, over their cloth caps, bright veils, white or green or blue, which were tied under their chins, and framed faces aglow with exercise and health.

Marsham’s eyes flew to Diana, who was in black, with a white veil.  Some of the natural curls on her temples, which reminded him of a Vandyck picture, had been a little blown by the wind across her beautiful brow; he liked the touch of wildness that they gave; and he was charmed anew by the contrast between her frank young strength, and the wistful look, so full of relation to all about it, as though seeking to understand and be one with it.  He perceived too her childish pleasure in each fresh incident and experience of the English winter, which proved to her anew that she had come home; and he flattered himself, as he went straight to her side, that his coming had at least no dimming effect on the radiance that had been there before.

“I believe you are not pining for the Mediterranean!” he said, laughing, as they walked on together.

In a smiling silence she drew in a great breath of the frosty air while her eyes ranged along the chalk down, on the western edge of which they were walking, and then over the plain at their feet, the smoke wreaths that hung above the villages, the western sky filled stormily with the purples and grays and crimsons of the sunset, the woods that climbed the down, or ran in a dark rampart along its crest.