“My father would never come home,” sighed Diana.  “He hated the English climate, even in summer.  Every year I used to beg him to let us go to England.  But he never would.  We lived abroad, first, I suppose, for his health, and then—­I can’t explain it.  Perhaps he thought he had been so long away he would find no old friends left.  And indeed so many of them had died.  But whenever I talked of it he began to look old and ill.  So I never could press it—­never!”

The girl’s voice fell to a lower note—­musical, and full of memory.  Mrs. Colwood noticed the quality of it.

“Of course if my mother had lived,” said Diana, in the same tone, “it would have been different.”

“But she died when you were a child?”

“Eighteen years ago.  I can just remember it.  We were in London then.  Afterwards father took me abroad, and we never came back.  Oh! the waste of all those years!”

“Waste?” Mrs. Colwood probed the phrase a little.  Diana insisted, first with warmth, and then with an eloquence that startled her companion, that for an Englishwoman to be brought up outside England, away from country and countrymen, was to waste and forego a hundred precious things that might have been gathered up.  “I used to be ashamed when I talked to English people.  Not that we saw many.  We lived for years and years at a little villa near Rapallo, and in the summer we used to go up into the mountains, away from everybody.  But after we came back from a long tour, we lived for a time at a hotel in Mentone—­our own little house was let—­and I used to talk to people there—­though papa never liked making friends.  And I made ridiculous mistakes about English things—­and they’d laugh.  But one can’t know—­unless one has lived—­has breathed in a country, from one’s birth.  That’s what I’ve lost.”

Mrs. Colwood demurred.

“Think of the people who wish they had grown up without ever reading or hearing about the Bible, so that they might read it for the first time, when they could really understand it.  You feel England all the more intensely now because you come fresh to her.”

Diana sprang up, with a change of face—­half laugh, half frown.

“Yes, I feel her!  Above all, I feel her enemies!”

She let in her dog, a fine collie, who was scratching at the door.  As she stood before the fire, holding up a biscuit for him to jump at, she turned a red and conscious face towards her companion.  The fire in the eyes, the smile on the lip seemed to say: 

“There!—­now we have come to it.  This is my passion—­my hobby—­this is me!”

“Her enemies!  You are political?”

“Desperately!”

“A Tory?”

“Fanatical.  But that’s only part of it, ’What should they know of England, that only England know!’”

Miss Mallory threw back her head with a gesture that became it.

“Ah, I see—­an Imperialist?”