Diana defended her new friend to ears unsympathetic.  Her defence, indeed, evoked from him a series of the same impatient, sarcastic remarks on the subject of the neighbors as had scandalized her the day before.  She fired up, and they were soon in the midst of another battle-royal, partly on the merits of particular persons and partly on a more general theme—­the advantage or disadvantage of an optimist view of your fellow-creatures.

Marsham was, before long, hard put to it in argument, and very delicately and discreetly convicted of arrogance or worse.  They were entering the woods of the park when he suddenly stopped and said: 

“Do you know that you have had a jolly good revenge—­pressed down and running over?”

Diana smiled, and said nothing.  She had delighted in the encounter; so, in spite of castigation, had he.  There surged up in him a happy excited consciousness of quickened life and hurrying hours.  He looked with distaste at the nearness of the house; and at the group of figures which had paused in front of them, waiting for them, on the farther edge of the broad lawn.

“You have convicted me of an odious, exclusive, bullying temper—­or you think you have—­and all you will allow me in the way of victory is that I got the best of it because Captain Roughsedge wasn’t there!”

“Not at all.  I respect your critical faculty!”

“You wish to hear me gush like Mrs. Minchin.  It is simply astounding the number of people you like!”

Diana’s laugh broke into a sigh.

“Perhaps it’s like a hungry boy in a goody-shop.  He wants to eat them all.”

“Were you so very solitary as a child?” he asked her, gently, in a changed tone, which was itself an act of homage, almost a caress.

“Yes—­I was very solitary,” she said, after a pause.  “And I am really gregarious—­dreadfully fond of people!—­and curious about them.  And I think, oddly enough, papa was too.”

A question rose naturally to his lips, but was checked unspoken.  He well remembered Mr. Mallory at Portofino; a pleasant courteous man, evidently by nature a man of the world, interested in affairs and in literature, with all the signs on him of the English governing class.  It was certainly curious that he should have spent all those years in exile with his child, in a remote villa on the Italian coast.  Health, Marsham supposed, or finance—­the two chief motives of life.  For himself, the thought of Diana’s childhood between the pine woods and the sea gave him pleasure; it added another to the poetical and romantic ideas which she suggested.  There came back on him the plash of the waves beneath the Portofino headland, the murmur of the pines, the fragrance of the underwood.  He felt the kindred between all these, and her maidenly energy, her unspoiled beauty.

“One moment!” he said, as they began to cross the lawn.  “Has my sister attacked you yet?”