“No one can ever love it as much as I do!”—­she said at last—­“because I have been an exile.  That will be my advantage always.”

“Your compensation—­perhaps.”

“Mrs. Colwood puts it that way.  Only I don’t like having my grievance taken away.”

“Against whom?”

“Ah! not against papa!” she said, hurriedly—­“against Fate!”

“If you dislike being deprived of a grievance—­so do I. You have returned me my Rossetti.”

She laughed merrily.

“You made sure I should lose or keep it?”

“It is the first book that anybody has returned to me for years.  I was quite resigned.”

“To a damaging estimate of my character?  Thank you very much!”

“I wonder”—­he said, in another tone—­“what sort of estimate you have of my character—­false, or true?”

“Well, there have been a great many surprises!” said Diana, raising her eyebrows.

“In the matter of my character?”

“Not altogether.”

“My surroundings?  You mean I talked Radicalism—­or, as you would call it, Socialism—­to you at Portofino, and here you find me in the character of a sporting Squire?”

“I hear”—­she said, deliberately looking about her—­“that this is the finest shoot in the county.”

“It is.  There is no denying it.  But, in the first place, it’s my mother’s shoot, not mine—­the estate is hers, not mine—­and she wishes old customs to be kept up.  In the next—­well, of course, the truth is that I like it abominably!”

He had thrust his cap into his pocket, and was walking bareheaded.  In the glow of the evening air his strong manhood seemed to gain an added force and vitality.  He moved beside her, magnified and haloed, as it were, by the dusk and the sunset.  Yet his effect upon her was no mere physical effect of good looks and a fine stature.  It was rather the effect of a personality which strangely fitted with and evoked her own—­of that congruity, indeed, from which all else springs.

She laughed at his confession.

“I hear also that you are the best shot in the neighborhood.”

“Who has been talking to you about me?” he asked, with a slight knitting of the brows.

“Mr. Ferrier—­a little.”

He gave an impatient sigh, so disproportionate to the tone of their conversation, that Diana looked at him in sudden surprise.

“Haven’t you often wondered how it is that the very people who know you best know you least?”

The question was impetuously delivered.  Diana recalled Mr. Forbes’s remarks as to dissensions behind the scenes.  She stepped cautiously.

“I thought Mr. Ferrier knew everything!”

“I wish he knew something about his party—­and the House of Commons!” cried Marsham, as though a passion within leaped to the surface.

The startled eyes beside him beguiled him further.

“I didn’t mean to say anything indiscreet—­or disloyal,” he said, with a smile, recovering himself.  “It is often the greatest men who cling to the old world—­when the new is clamoring.  But the new means to be heard all the same.”