She was indeed so pale that Diana was rather frightened, and remembering that in the afternoon she had seen Miss Vincent descend from an upper floor, she offered a rest in her own room, which was close by, before the evidently lame woman attempted further stairs.

Marion Vincent hesitated a moment, then accepted.  Diana hurried up a chair to the fire, installed her there, and herself sat on the floor watching her guest with some anxiety.

Yet, as she did so, she felt a certain antagonism.  The face, of which the eyes were now closed, was nobly grave.  The expression of its deeply marked lines appealed to her heart.  But why this singularity—­this eccentricity?  Miss Vincent wore the same dress of dark woollen stuff, garnished with white frills, in which she had appeared the night before, and her morning attire, as Mr. Frobisher had foretold, had consisted of a precisely similar garment, adorned with a straight collar instead of frills.  Surely a piece of acting!—­of unnecessary self-assertion!

Yet all through the day—­and the evening—­Diana had been conscious of this woman’s presence, in a strange penetrating way, even when they had had least to do with each other.  In the intervals of her own joyous progress she had been often aware of Miss Vincent sitting apart, sometimes with Mr. Frobisher, who was reading or talking to her, sometimes with Lady Lucy, and—­during the dance—­with John Barton.  Barton might have been the Jeremiah or the Ezekiel of the occasion.  He sat astride upon a chair, in his respectable workman’s clothes, his eyes under their shaggy brows, his weather-beaten features and compressed lips expressing an ill-concealed contempt for the scene before him.  It was rumored that he had wished to depart before dinner, having concluded his consultation with Mr. Ferrier, but that Mrs. Fotheringham had persuaded him to remain for the night.  His presence seemed to make dancing a misdemeanor, and the rich house, with its services and appurtenances, an organized crime.  But if his personality was the storm-point of the scene, charged with potential lightning, Marion Vincent’s was the still small voice, without threat or bitterness, which every now and then spoke to a quick imagination like Diana’s its message from a world of poverty and pain.  And sometimes Diana had been startled by the perception that the message seemed to be specially for her.  Miss Vincent’s eyes followed her; whenever Diana passed near her, she smiled—­she admired.  But always, as it seemed to Diana, with a meaning behind the smile.  Yet what that meaning might be the girl could not tell.

At last, as she watched her, Marion Vincent looked up.

“Mr. Barton would talk to me just now about the history of his own life.  I suppose it was the dance and the supper excited him.  He began to testify!  Sometimes when he does that he is magnificent.  He said some fine things to-night.  But I am run down and couldn’t stand it.”