Mrs. Roughsedge secretly wondered whether this statement was meant to account for the frequent presence of Oliver Marsham at Beechcote.  She had herself met him in the lane riding away from Beechcote no less than three times during the past fortnight.

“Please come in to tea!” said Diana; “I am just expecting my cousin—­Miss Merton.  Mrs. Colwood and I are so excited!—­we have never had a visitor here before.  I came out to try and find some snow-drops for her room.  There is really nothing in the greenhouses—­and I can’t make the house look nice.”

Certainly as they entered and passed through the panelled hall to the drawing-room Hugh Roughsedge saw no need for apology.  Amid the warm dimness of the house he was aware of a few starry flowers, a few gleaming and beautiful stuffs, the white and black of an engraving, or the blurred golds and reds of an old Italian picture, humble school-work perhaps, collected at small cost by Diana’s father, yet still breathing the magic of the Enchanted Land.  The house was refined, pleading, eager—­like its mistress.  It made no display—­but it admitted no vulgarity.  “These things are not here for mere decoration’s sake,” it seemed to say.  “Dear kind hands have touched them; dear silent voices have spoken of them.  Love them a little, you also!—­and be at home.”

Not that Hugh Roughsedge made any such conscious analysis of his impressions.  Yet the house appealed to him strangely.  He thought Miss Mallory’s taste marvellous; and it is one of the superiorities in women to which men submit most readily.

The drawing-room had especially a festive air.  Mrs. Colwood was keeping tea-cakes hot, and building up a blazing fire with logs of beech-wood.  When she had seated her guests, Diana put the snow-drops she had gathered into an empty vase, and looked round her happily, as though now she had put the last touch to all her preparations.  She talked readily of her cousin’s coming to Mrs. Roughsedge; and she inquired minutely of Hugh when the next meet was to be, that she might take her guest to see it.

“Fanny will be just as new to it all as I!” she said.  “That’s so nice, isn’t it?” Then she offered Mrs. Roughsedge cake, and looked at her askance with a hanging head.  “Have you heard—­about the Vicar?”

Mrs. Roughsedge admitted it.

“I did lose my temper,” said Diana, repentantly.  “But really!—­papa used to tell me it was a sign of weakness to say violent things you couldn’t prove.  Wasn’t it Lord Shaftesbury that said some book he didn’t like was ‘vomited out of the jaws of hell’?  Well, the Vicar said things very like that.  He did indeed!”

“Oh no, my dear, no!” cried Mrs. Roughsedge, disturbed by the quotation, even, of such a remark.  Hugh Roughsedge grinned.  Diana, however, insisted.

“Of course, I would have given them up.  Only I just happened to say that papa always read everything he could by those two men—­and then”—­she flushed—­“Well, I don’t exactly remember what Mr. Lavery said.  But I know that when he’d said it I wouldn’t have given up either of those books for the world!”