Diana walked quickly through the woods, the prey of one of those vague storms of feeling which test and stretch the soul of youth.

To what horrors had she been listening?—­the suffering of the blinded road-mender—­the grotesque and hideous death of the young laborer in his full strength—­the griefs of a childless and penniless old woman?  Yet life had somehow engulfed the horrors; and had spread its quiet waves above them, under a pale, late-born sunshine.  The stoicism of the poor rebuked her, as she thought of the sharp impatience and disappointment in which she had parted from Mrs. Colwood.

She seemed to hear her father’s voice.  “No shirking, Diana!  You asked her—­you formed absurd and exaggerated expectations.  She is here; and she is not responsible for your expectations.  Make the best of her, and do your duty!”

And eagerly the child’s heart answered:  “Yes, yes, papa!—­dear papa!”

And there, sharp in color and line, it rose on the breast of memory, the beloved face.  It set pulses beating in Diana which from her childhood onward had been a life within her life, a pain answering to pain, the child’s inevitable response to the father’s misery, always discerned, never understood.

This abiding remembrance of a dumb unmitigable grief beside which she had grown up, of which she had never known the secret, was indeed one of the main factors in Diana’s personality.  Muriel Colwood had at once perceived it; Marsham had been sometimes puzzled by the signs of it.

To-day—­because of Fanny and this toppling of her dreams—­the dark mood, to which Diana was always liable, had descended heavily upon her.  She had no sooner rebuked it—­by the example of the poor, or the remembrance of her father’s long patience—­than she was torn by questions, vehement, insistent, full of a new anguish.

Why had her father been so unhappy?  What was the meaning of that cloud under which she had grown up?

She had repeated to Muriel Colwood the stock explanations she had been accustomed to give herself of the manner and circumstances of her bringing-up.  To-day they seemed to her own mind, for the first time, utterly insufficient.  In a sudden crash and confusion of feeling it was as though she were tearing open the heart of the past, passionately probing and searching.

Certain looks and phrases of Fanny Merton were really working in her memory.  They were so light—­yet so ugly.  They suggested something, but so vaguely that Diana could find no words for it:  a note of desecration, of cheapening—­a breath of dishonor.  It was as though a mourner, shut in for years with sacred memories, became suddenly aware that all the time, in a sordid world outside, these very memories had been the sport of an unkind and insolent chatter that besmirched them.

Her mother!