It was to be expected, of course; he could only hope it would soon pass.  Secretly, after a time, he was repelled and wearied.  He answered her with the same tender words, he tried to be all kindness; but more perfunctorily.  The oneness of that supreme moment vanished and did not return.

Meanwhile, Diana’s perceptions, stunned by the one overmastering thought, gave her no warning.  And, in truth, if Marsham could have understood, the process of mental recovery was set going in her by just this freedom of utterance to the man she loved—­these words and looks and tears—­that brought ease after the dumb horror of the first hours.

At last he made an effort, hiding the nascent impatience in a caress.

“If I could only persuade you not to dwell upon it too persistently—­to put it from your thoughts as soon and as much as you can!  Dear, we shall have our own anxieties!”

She looked up with a sudden start.

“My mother,” he said, reluctantly, “may give us trouble.”

The color rushed into Diana’s cheeks, and ebbed with equal suddenness.

“Lady Lucy!  Oh!—­how could I forget?  Oliver!—­she thinks—­I am not fit!”

And in her eyes he saw for the first time the self-abasement he had dreaded, yet perhaps expected, to see there before.  For in her first question to him there had been no real doubt of him; it had been the natural humility of wounded love that cries out, expecting the reply that no power on earth could check itself from giving were the case reversed.

“Dearest! you know my mother’s bringing up:  her Quaker training, and her rather stern ideas.  We shall persuade her—­in time.”

“In time?  And now—­she—­she forbids it?”

Her voice faltered.  And yet, unconsciously, she had drawn herself a little together and away.

Marsham began to give a somewhat confused and yet guarded account of his mother’s state of mind, endeavoring to prepare her for the letter which might arrive on the morrow.  He got up and moved about the room as he spoke, while Diana sat, looking at him, her lips trembling from time to time.  Presently he mentioned Ferrier’s name, and Diana started.

“Does he think it would do you harm—­that you ought to give me up?”

“Not he!  And if anybody can make my mother hear reason, it will be Ferrier.”

“Lady Lucy believes it would injure you in Parliament?” faltered Diana.

“No, I don’t believe she does.  No sane person could.”

“Then it’s because—­of the disgrace?  Oliver!—­perhaps—­you ought to give me up?”

She breathed quick.  It stabbed him to see the flush in her cheeks contending with the misery in her eyes.  She could not pose, or play a part.  What she could not hide from him was just the conflict between her love and her new-born shame.  Before that scene on the hill there would have been her girlish dignity also to reckon with.  But the greater had swallowed up the less; and from her own love—­in innocent and simple faith—­she imagined his.