No!—­he resigned himself.  He would do nothing mean and ungentlemanly.  A policy of waiting and diplomacy should be tried.  Ferrier might be of some use.  But, if nothing availed, he must marry and make the best of it.  He wondered to what charitable societies his mother would leave her money!

Slowly he strolled back along the hill.  That dim light, high up on the shrouded walls of Beechcote, seemed to go with him, softly, insistently reminding him of Diana.  The thought of her moved him deeply.  He longed to have her in his arms, to comfort her, to feel her dependent on him for the recovery of joy and vitality.  It was only by an obstinate and eager dwelling upon her sweetness and charm that he could protect himself against the rise of an invading wave of repugnance and depression; the same repugnance, the same instinctive longing to escape, which he had always felt, as boy or man, in the presence of sickness, or death, or mourning.

* * * * *

Marsham had been long asleep in his queer little room at “The Green Man.”  The last lights were out in the village, and the moon had set.  Diana stole out of bed; Muriel must not hear her, Muriel whose eyes were already so tired and tear-worn with another’s grief.  She went to the window, and, throwing a shawl over her, she knelt there, looking out.  She was dimly conscious of stars, of the hill, the woods; what she really saw was a prison room as she was able to imagine it, and her mother lying there—­her young mother—­only four years older than she, Diana, was now.  Or again she saw the court of law—­the judge in the black cap—­and her mother looking up.  Fanny had said she was small and slight—­with dark hair.

The strange frozen horror of it made tears—­or sleep—­or rest—­impossible.  She did not think much of Marsham; she could hardly remember what she had written to him.  Love was only another anguish.  Nor could it protect her from the images which pursued her.  The only thought which seemed to soothe the torture of imagination was the thought stamped on her brain tissue by the long inheritance of centuries—­the thought of Christ on Calvary.  “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” The words repeated themselves again and again.  She did not pray in words.  But her agony crept to the foot of what has become through the action and interaction of two thousand years, the typical and representative agony of the world, and, clinging there, made wild appeal, like the generations before her, to a God in whose hand lie the creatures of His will.

* * * * *

“Mrs. Colwood said I might come and say good-bye to you,” said Fanny Merton, holding her head high.

She stood on the threshold of Diana’s little sitting-room, looking in.  There was an injured pride in her bearing, balanced by a certain anxiety which seemed to keep it within bounds.

“Please come in,” said Diana.