She crossed the room to where Mrs. Eveleth appeared on the threshold, and, taking her by the hand, led her to the chair which Pruyn placed for her.

“I’d better go, Diane dear,” Miss Lucilla whispered, tremblingly.

“Please don’t,” Diane insisted.  “I’d much rather have you stay.  I’ve no secrets from Miss Lucilla,” she added, speaking to Derek.  “I need a woman friend; and I’ve found one.”

“You couldn’t find a better,” Pruyn murmured, while Miss Lucilla slipped her arm around Diane’s waist, rather to steady herself than to support her friend.

“Miss Lucilla knows everything that you know, petite mere,” Diane continued, turning to where her mother-in-law sat, slightly bowed, her extended hand resting on her cane, like some graceful Sibyl.  “She knows everything that you know, and she knows one thing more.  She knows what some cruel people say was the way in which—­George died.”

Diane uttered the last two words in a kind of sob, and Mrs. Eveleth looked up, startled.

“George—­died?” she questioned, slowly, with a look of wonder.

Diane nodded, unable, for the minute, to speak.

“But we know how—­he died.”

“Mr. Pruyn tells me that we don’t.”

“I beg you not to put it in that way,” Derek said, hurriedly.  “I repeated only what was told me, and what was afterward verified.  Do you not think we can spare Mrs. Eveleth what must be so painful?”

“There’s no need to spare me, Mr. Pruyn.  I think I’ve reached the point to which old people often come—­where they can’t feel any more.”

“Oh, mother, don’t say that,” Diane wailed, with a curiously childlike cry.  She had never before called Mrs. Eveleth mother, and the word sounded strangely in this room which had not heard it since Miss Lucilla was a little girl.  “My mother would rather know,” she declared, almost proudly, speaking again to Pruyn, “than be kept in ignorance of something in which she could help me so much.”

“What is it?” Mrs. Eveleth asked, eagerly.

Then Diane told her.  It had been stated, so she said, that George had not fallen in her defence, but by his own hand—­to escape her; and there was no one in the world but his own mother to give this monstrous calumny the lie.  During the recital Mrs. Eveleth sat with clasped hands, but with head sinking lower at each word.  Once she murmured something which only Miss Lucilla was near enough to hear: 

“Then that’s why they wouldn’t let me look at him in his coffin.”

“He did love me, didn’t he?” Diane cried.  “He was happy with me, wasn’t he, mother dear?  He understood me, and upheld me, and defended me, whatever I did.  He didn’t want to leave me.  He knew I should never have cared for the loss of the money—­that we could have faced that together.  Tell them so, mother; tell them.”

For the first time since he had known her Derek saw Diane forget her reserve in eager pleading.  She stepped forward from Miss Lucilla’s embrace, standing before Mrs. Eveleth with palms opened outward, in an attitude of petition.  The older woman did not raise her head nor speak.