Diana shook her head.

“I can’t be friends with him,” she said, naively, “for a long long time.  But I’ll rewrite my list.  And must I go and call on the Miss Bertrams to-morrow?”

Her mock and smiling submission, as she stood, slender and lovely, amid the shadows of the hall, seemed to Hugh Roughsedge, as he looked back upon her, the prettiest piece of acting.  Then she turned, and he knew that she was going back to Marsham.  At the same moment he saw Mrs. Colwood’s little figure disappearing up the main stairway.  Frowning and silent, he followed his mother out of the house.

Diana looked round rather wistfully for Mrs. Colwood as she re-entered the room; but that lady had many letters to write.

Marsham noticed Mrs. Colwood’s retreat with a thrill of pleasure.  Yet even now he had no immediate declaration in his mind.  The course that he had marked out for himself had been exactly followed.  There had been no “hurrying it.”  Only in these weeks before Parliament, while matters of great moment to his own political future were going forward, and his participation in them was not a whit less cool and keen than it had always been, he had still found abundant time for the wooing of Diana.  He had assumed a kind of guardian’s attitude in the matter of her relations to the Vavasours—­who in business affairs had proved both greedy and muddle-headed; he had flattered her woman’s vanity by the insight he had freely allowed her into the possibilities and the difficulties of his own Parliamentary position, and of his relations to Ferrier; and he had kept alive a kind of perpetual interest and flutter in her mind concerning him, by the challenge he was perpetually offering to the opinions and ideas in which she had been brought up—­while yet combining it with a respect toward her father’s memory, so courteous, and, in truth, sincere, that she was alternately roused and subdued.

On this February evening, it seemed to his exultant sense, as Diana sat chatting to him beside the fire, that his power with her had substantially advanced, that by a hundred subtle signs—­quite involuntary on her part—­she let him understand that his personality was pressing upon hers, penetrating her will, transforming her gay and fearless composure.

For instance, he had been lending her books representing his own political and social opinions.  To her they were anathema.  Her father’s soul in her regarded them as forces of the pit, rising in ugly clamor to drag down England from her ancient place.  But to hate and shudder at them from afar had been comparatively easy.  To battle with them at close quarters, as presented by this able and courteous antagonist, who passed so easily and without presumption from the opponent into the teacher, was a more teasing matter.  She had many small successes and side-victories, but they soon ceased to satisfy her, in presence of the knowledge and ability of a man who had been ten years in Parliament, and had made for himself—­she began to understand—­a considerable position there.  She was hotly loyal to her own faiths; but she was conscious of what often seemed to her a dangerous and demoralizing interest in his!  A demoralizing pleasure, too, in listening—­in sometimes laying aside the watchful, hostile air, in showing herself sweet, yielding, receptive.