and reprobation.  The last vestige of that just, instinctive pharisaism which clothes an unstained youth had dropped from her.  As the heir of her mother’s fate, she had gone down into the dark sea of human wrong and misery, and she had emerged transformed, more akin by far to the wretched and the unhappy than to the prosperous and the untempted, so that, through all repulsion and shock, she took Fanny now as she found her—­bearing with her—­accepting her—­loving her, as far as she could.  At the last even that stubborn nature was touched.  When Diana kissed her after the wedding, with a few tremulous good wishes, Fanny’s gulp was not all excitement.  Yet it must still be recorded that on the wedding-day Fanny was in the highest spirits, only marred by some annoyance that she had let Diana persuade her out of a white satin wedding-dress.

[Illustration:  “SIR JAMES PLAYED DIANA’S GAME WITH PERFECT DISCRETION”]

* * * * *

Diana’s preoccupation with this matter carried her through the first week of Marsham’s second campaign, and deadened so far the painful effect of the contest now once more thundering through the division.  For it was even a more odious battle than the first had been.  In the first place, the moderate Liberals held a meeting very early in the struggle, with Sir William Felton in the chair, to protest against the lukewarm support which Marsham had given to the late leader of the Opposition, to express their lamentation for Ferrier, and their distrust of Lord Philip; and to decide upon a policy.

At the meeting a heated speech was made by a gray-haired squire, an old friend and Oxford contemporary of John Ferrier’s, who declared that he had it on excellent authority that the communicated article in the Herald, which had appeared on the morning of Ferrier’s sudden death, had been written by Oliver Marsham.

This statement was reported in the newspapers of the following morning, and was at once denied by Marsham himself, in a brief letter to the Times.

It was this letter which Lady Felton discussed hotly with Sir James Chide on the day when Fanny Merton’s misdemeanors also came up for judgment.

“He says he didn’t write it.  Sir William declares—­a mere quibble!  He has it from several people that Barrington was at Tallyn two days before the article appeared, and that he spoke to one or two friends next day of an ‘important’ conversation with Marsham, and of the first-hand information he had got from it.  Nobody was so likely as Oliver to have that intimate knowledge of poor Mr. Ferrier’s intentions and views.  William believes that he gave Barrington all the information in the article, and wrote nothing himself, in order that he might be able to deny it.”

Sir James met these remarks with an impenetrable face.  He neither defended Marsham, nor did he join in Lady Felton’s denunciations.  But that good lady, who though voluble was shrewd, told her husband afterward that she was certain Sir James believed Marsham to be responsible for the Herald article.