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But every Friday night she and Maxwell said good-bye to the two little workhouse girls, and the German charwoman, and the village boy from Mellor, who supplied them with all the service they wanted in Mile End, took with them the ancient maid who had been Marcella's mother's maid, and fled home to Brookshire.
Everything, it seemed, was wanted for election purposes. But she understood that Miss Mallory was quite well and not breaking her heart at all. At the present moment she was the most popular person in Brookshire, and would be the most petted, if she would allow it. But she and Mrs.
Brookshire knew, through one or other of the mysterious channels by which such news travels, that the two cousins were uncongenial; that it was Fanny Merton who had revealed to Diana her mother's history, and in an abrupt, unfeeling way; and that the two girls were not now in communication.
"A neighbour of theirs in Brookshire," she was saying, "was giving me last week the most extraordinary account of the doings at Mellor. She was the heiress of that house at Mellor" here she addressed young Bayle, who, as a comparative stranger in the house, might be supposed to be ignorant of facts which everybody else knew "a tumbledown place with an income of about two thousand a year.
She pleaded not without tears to be given the happiness of knowing they were pledged, and her Muriel safe in harbor. So Roughsedge had his say; a quiet engagement began its course in the world; Brookshire as yet knew nothing; and the doctor triumphed over Patricia.
Marsham considered that he had as good claims as any of the younger men; and if it came to another election in Brookshire, hateful as the prospect was, he should be fighting in the open, and choosing his own weapons. No shirking! His whole being gathered itself into a passionate determination to retaliate upon the persons who had injured, thwarted, and calumniated him during the contest just over.
All this Brookshire knew, and none of it did Diana know. Since her return she and Mrs. Colwood had lived so quietly within their own borders that the talk of the neighborhood rarely reached her, and those persons who came in contact with her were far too deeply touched by the signs of suffering in the girl's face and manner to breathe a word that might cause her fresh pain.
Or if there were any, it was all Marcella's. In spite of her passionate sympathy with the multitude who live in disagreeable homes on about a pound a week, she herself was very sensitive to the neighbourhood of beautiful things, to the charm of old homes, cool woods, green lawns, and the rise and fall of Brookshire hills.
He shut, stamped, and posted what he had written. At mid-day, in her Brookshire village, Diana received the letter with another from London, in a handwriting she did not know. When she had read Marsham's it dropped from her hand. The color flooded her cheeks as though the heart leaped beneath a fresh blow which it could not realize or measure. Was it so she would have written to Oliver if
For it appeared there was to be no engagement, although all Brookshire had expected it. Instead of it, came the announcement of the tragic truth, the girl's hurried departure, and the passionate feeling on her behalf of people like the Roughsedges, or her quondam critic, the Vicar. Marsham, thereupon, had become conscious of a wind of unpopularity blowing through his constituency.
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