“Too late to think of that!” said Fanny, doggedly.

Diana looked up in sudden terror.  Fanny tried to brazen it out.  But all the patchy color left her cheeks, and, dropping her head on her hands, she began to sob.  Yet even the sobs were angry.

“I can go and drown myself!” she said, passionately, “and I suppose I’d better.  Nobody cares whether I do or not!  He’s made a fool of me—­I don’t suppose mother’ll take me home again.  And if he doesn’t marry me, I’ll kill myself somehow—­it don’t matter how—­before—­I’ve got to!”

Diana had dropped on her knees beside her visitor.  Unconsciously—­pitifully—­she breathed her cousin’s name.  Fanny looked up.  She wrenched herself violently away.

“Oh, it’s all very well!—­but we can’t all be such saints as you.  It’d be all right if he married me directly—­directly,” she repeated, hurriedly.

Diana knelt still immovable.  In her face was that agonized shock and recoil with which the young and pure, the tenderly cherished and guarded, receive the first withdrawal of the veil which hides from them the more brutal facts of life.  But, as she knelt there, gazing at Fanny, another expression stole upon and effaced the first.  Taking shape and body, as it were, from the experience of the moment, there rose into sight the new soul developed in her by this tragic year.  Not for her—­not for Juliet Sparling’s daughter—­the plea of cloistered innocence!  By a sharp transition her youth had passed from the Chamber of Maiden Thought into the darkened Chamber of Experience.  She had steeped her heart in the waters of sin and suffering; she put from her in an instant the mere maiden panic which had drawn her to her knees.

“Fanny, I’ll help you!” she said, in a low voice, putting her arms round her cousin.  “Don’t cry—­I’ll help you.”

Fanny raised her head.  In Diana’s face there was something which, for the first time, roused in the other a nascent sense of shame.  The color came rushing into her cheeks; her eyes wavered painfully.

“You must come and stay here,” said Diana, almost in a whisper.  “And where is Mr. Birch?  I must see him.”

She rose as she spoke; her voice had a decision, a sternness, that Fanny for once did not resent.  But she shook her head despairingly.

“I can’t get at him.  He sends my letters back.  He’ll not marry me unless he’s paid to.”

“When did you see him last?”

Gradually the whole story emerged.  The man had behaved as the coarse and natural man face to face with temptation and opportunity is likely to behave.  The girl had been the victim first and foremost of her own incredible folly.  And Diana could not escape the idea that on Birch’s side there had not been wanting from the first an element of sinister calculation.  If her relations objected to the situation, it could, of course, be made worth his while to change it.  All his recent sayings and doings, as Fanny reported them, clearly bore this interpretation.