The smile with which the words were spoken could be heard though not seen.  Diana laughed, a little awkwardly.

“I am afraid Mrs. Fotheringham thinks me a child of blood and thunder!  I am so sorry!”

“If she presses you too hard, call me in.  Isabel and I understand each other.”

Diana murmured something polite.

Mr. Frobisher meanwhile came to meet them with a remark upon the beauty of the evening, and Alicia Drake followed.

“I expect you found it a horrid long way,” she said to Diana.  Diana disclaimed fatigue.

“You came so slowly, we thought you must be tired.”

Something in the drawling manner and the slightly insolent expression made the words sting.  Diana hurried on to Marion Vincent’s side.  That lady was leaning on a stick, and for the first time Diana saw that she was slightly lame.  She looked up with a pleasant smile and greeting; but before they could move on across the ample drive, Mr. Frobisher overtook them.

“Won’t you take my arm?” he said, in a low voice.

Miss Vincent slipped her hand inside his arm, and rested on him.  He supported her with what seemed to Diana a tender carefulness, his head bent to hers, while he talked and she replied.

Diana followed, her girl’s heart kindling.

“Surely!—­surely!—­they are in love?—­engaged?”

But no one else appeared to take any notice or made any remark.

Long did the memory of the evening which followed live warm in the heart of Diana.  It was to her an evening of triumph—­triumph innocent, harmless, and complete.  Her charm, her personality had by now captured the whole party, save for an opposition of three—­and the three realized that they had for the moment no chance of influencing the popular voice.  The rugged face of Mr. Barton stiffened as she approached; it seemed to him that the night before he had been snubbed by a chit, and he was not the man to forget it easily.  Alicia Drake was a little pale and a little silent during the evening, till, late in its course, she succeeded in carrying off a group of young men who had come for the shoot and were staying the night, and in establishing a noisy court among them Mrs. Fotheringham disapproved, by now, of almost everything that concerned Miss Mallory:  of her taste in music or in books, of the touch of effusion in her manner, which was of course “affected” or “aristocratic”; of the enthusiasms she did not possess, no less than of those She did.  On the sacred subject of the suffrage, for instance, which with Mrs. Fotheringham was a matter for propaganda everywhere and at all times, Diana was but a cracked cymbal, when struck she gave back either no sound at all, or a wavering one.  Her beautiful eyes were blank or hostile; she would escape like a fawn from the hunter.  As for other politics, no one but Mrs. Fotheringham dreamed of introducing them.  She, however, would have discovered many ways of dragging them in, and of setting down Diana; but here her brother was on the watch, and time after time she found herself checked or warded off.