from the delirium of a night’s hunting.  The son of Miss Bertram’s coachman had only just missed an appointment under the District Council by one place on the list of candidates.  A “Red Van” bursting with Socialist literature had that morning taken up its place on the village green; and Diana’s poor housemaid, in payment for a lifetime’s neglect, must now lose every tooth in her head, according to the verdict of the local dentist, an excellent young man, in Mrs. Roughsedge’s opinion, but ready to give you almost too much pulling out for your money.  On all these topics she overflowed—­with much fun and unfailing good-humor.  So that after half an hour spent with Mrs. Roughsedge and Hugh in the little drawing-room at the White Cottage, Diana’s aspect was very different from what it had been when she arrived.

Hugh, however, had noticed her pallor and depression.  He was obstinately certain that Oliver Marsham was not the man to make such a girl happy.  Between the rich Radical member and the young officer—­poor, slow of speech and wits, and passionately devoted to the old-fashioned ideals and traditions in which he had been brought up—­there was a natural antagonism.  But Roughsedge’s contempt for his brilliant and successful neighbor—­on the ground of selfish ambitions and unpatriotic trucklings—­was, in truth, much more active than anything Marsham had ever shown—­or felt—­toward himself.  For in the young soldier there slept potentialities of feeling and of action, of which neither he nor others were as yet aware.

Nevertheless, he faced the facts.  He remembered the look with which Diana had returned to the Beechcote drawing-room, where Marsham awaited her, the day before—­and told himself not to be a fool.

Meanwhile he had found an opportunity in which to tell her, unheard by his parents, that he was practically certain of his Nigerian appointment, and must that night break it to his father and mother.  And Diana had listened like a sister, all sympathy and kind looks, promising in the young man’s ear, as he said good-bye at the garden gate, that she would come again next day to cheer his mother up.

He stood looking after her as she walked away; his hands in his pockets, a flush on his handsome face.  How her coming had glorified and transformed the place!  No womanish nonsense, too, about this going of his!—­though she knew well that it meant fighting.  Only a kindling of the eyes—­a few questions as practical as they were eager—­and then that fluttering of the soft breath which he had noticed as she bent over his mother.

But she was not for him!  Thus it is that women—­the noblest and the dearest—­throw themselves away.  She, with all the right and proper feelings of an Englishwoman, to mate with this plausible Radical and Little Englander!  Hugh kicked the stones of the gravel savagely to right and left as he walked back to the house—­in a black temper with his poverty and Diana’s foolishness.