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And he came to see Diana and still Diana knew nothing! Mrs. Colwood must simply be telling lies silly lies! Fanny glanced at her with contempt. Yet so bewildered was she that when Sir James addressed her, she stared at him in what seemed a fit of shyness. And when she began to talk it was at random, for her mind was in a tumult. But Sir James soon divined her.
A widow, and childless, in a strange place. Mrs. Colwood, however, showed no further melancholy. She was full of admiration for the beauty of the frosty morning, the trees touched with rime, the browns and purples of the distant woods.
"A very attractive personality! fresh and womanly no nonsense heart enough for a dozen. But all the same the intellect is hungry, and wants feeding. No one will ever succeed with her, Oliver, who forgets she has a brain. Ah! here she is!" For the door had been thrown open, and Diana entered, followed by Mrs. Colwood.
And in mentioning that name she showed not the smallest misgiving, not a trace of uneasiness, while every time it was uttered it pricked the shrinking sense of her companion. Mrs. Colwood had not watched and listened during her Tallyn visit for nothing. At last a clock struck down-stairs, and a door opened. Diana sprang up. "Time to dress! And I've left Fanny alone all this while!"
Instead, she began to give her companion some preliminary information as to the party they were likely to find at Tallyn. As Mrs. Colwood already knew, Mr. Oliver Marsham, member for the Western division of Brookshire, was young and unmarried. He lived with his mother, Lady Lucy Marsham, the owner of Tallyn Hall; and his widowed sister, Mrs. Fotheringham, was also a constant inmate of the house.
I hope that all good will come to you always. "Probably Mrs. Colwood and I shall go abroad for a little while. I want to be alone and it will be easiest so. Indeed, if possible, we shall leave London to-morrow night. Good-bye. She rose, and stood looking down upon the letter. A thought struck her.
She examined everything, in a swift keen scrutiny, and then as the pouncing glance came back to her cousin, the girl suddenly exclaimed: "Goodness! but you are like Aunt Sparling!" Diana flushed crimson. She drew back and said, hurriedly, to Mrs. Colwood: "Muriel, would you see if they have taken the luggage up-stairs?" Mrs. Colwood went at once.
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.
Colwood noticed the quality of it. "Of course if my mother had lived," said Diana, in the same tone, "it would have been different." "But she died when you were a child?" "Eighteen years ago. I can just remember it. We were in London then. Afterwards father took me abroad, and we never came back. Oh! the waste of all those years!" "Waste?" Mrs. Colwood probed the phrase a little.
The resentment of Diana's place in life, as of something robbed, not earned the scarcely concealed claim either to share it or attack it these things were no longer riddles to Muriel Colwood. Rather they were the storm-signs of a coming tempest, already darkening above an innocent head. What could she do? The little lady gave her days and nights to the question, and saw no way out.
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