LIBRARY UNIVERSITY Of CALIFORNIA SAN OIEOO ^ - - F The Testing of Diana Mallory "THERE SHE WAITED WHILE THE DAWN STOLE UPON THE NIGHT " The Testing of Diana M all orij BY MRS. HUMPHRY WARD ILLUSTRATED BY W. HATHERELL, R. I. HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS NEW YORK AND LONDON 1908 BOOKS BY MRS. HUMPHRY WARD THE TESTING OP DIANA MALLORT. Ill'd. . . $1.50 LADY ROSE'S DAUGHTER. Illustrated . . . 1.50 Two volume edition 3.00 THE MARRIAGE OF WILLIAM ASHB. Ill'd. . . 1.50 Two volume Autograph edition . . net 4.00 FENWICK'S CAREER. Illustrated- 1.50 De Luxe edition, two volumes. . . net 5.00 ELEANOR 1.50 LIFE OF W. T. ARNOLD net 1.50 HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, N. Y. Copyright, 1907, 1908, by HARPER & BROTHERS. All rights rtstnttf. Published September, 1908. TO MY KIND HOSTS BEYOND THE ATLANTIC FROM A GRATEFUL TRAVELLER JULY. 19O8 Illustrations "THERE SHE WAITED WHILE THE DAWN STOLE UPON THE NIGHT " Frontispiece "THE MAN'S PULSES LEAPED ANEW" Facing p. 98 "YOU NEEDN'T BE CROSS WITH ME, DIANA" ... " 174 "'DEAR LADY,' HE SAID, GENTLY, 'i THINK YOU OUGHT TO GIVE WAY!'" " 256 " ALICIA, UPRIGHT IN HER CORNER OLIVER, DEEP IN HIS ARMCHAIR" " 332 "SIR JAMES PLAYED DIANA*S GAME WITH PERFECT DISCRETION" " 462 " SIR JAMES MADE HIMSELF DELIGHTFUL TO THEM" . " 492 " ROUGHSEDGE STOOD NEAR, RELUCTANTLY WAITING" " 514 Part I '* Action is transitory a step, a blow. The motion of a muscle this way or that "Tis done, and in the after-vacancy We wonder at ourselves like men betrayed: Suffering is permanent, obscure, and dark, And shares the nature of infinity" THE BORDERERS. The Testing of Diana Mallorg CHAPTER I THE clock in the tower of the village church had just struck the quarter. In the southeast a pale dawn light was beginning to show above the curving hollow of the down wherein the village lay enfolded; but the face of the down itself was still in darkness. Farther to the south, in a stretch of clear night sky hardly touched by the mounting dawn, Venus shone enthroned, so large and brilliant, so near to earth and the spectator, that she held, she pervaded the whole dusky scene, the shadowed fields and wintry woods, as though she were their very soul and voice. "The Star of Bethlehem ! and Christmas Day!" Diana Mallory had just drawn back the curtain of her bedroom. Her voice, as she murmured the words, was full of a joyous delight; eagerness and yearning expressed themselves in her bending attitude, her parted lips and eyes intent upon the star. The panelled room behind her was dimly lit by a solitary candle, just kindled. The faint dawn in front, the flickering candle-light behind, illumined Diana's tall figure, wrapped in a white dressing-gown, her small head and slender neck, the tumbling masses of her dark hair, 3 The Testing of Diana Mallory and the hand holding the curtain. It was a kind and poetic light ; but her youth and grace needed no softening. After the striking of the quarter, the church bell began to ring, with a gentle, yet insistent note which gradually filled the hollows of the village, and echoed along the side of the down. Once or twice the sound was effaced by the rush and roar of a distant train; and once the call of an owl from a wood, a call melancholy and pro- longed, was raised as though in rivalry. But the bell held Diana's strained ear throughout its course, till its mild clangor passed into the deeper note of the clock striking the hour, and then all sounds alike died into a profound yet listening silence. "Eight o'clock! That was for early service," she thought; and there flashed into her mind an image of the old parish church, dimly lit for the Christmas Eucharist, its walls and pillars decorated with ivy and holly, yet austere and cold through all its adornings, with its bare walls and pale windows. She shivered a little, for her youth had been accustomed to churches all color and lights and furnishings churches of another type and faith. But instantly some warm leaping instinct met the shrinking, and overpowered it. She smote her hands together. "England! England! my own, own country!" She dropped upon the window-seat half laughing, yet the tears in her eyes. And there, with her face pressed against the glass, she waited while the dawn stole upon the night, while in the park the trees emerged upon the grass white with rime, while on the face of the down thickets and paths became slowly visible, while the first wreaths of smoke began to curl and hover in the frosty air. 4 The Testing of Diana Mallorg Suddenly, on a path which climbed the hill-side till it was lost in the beech wood which crowned the summit, she saw a flock of sheep, and behind them a shepherd boy running from side to side. At the sight, her eyes kindled again. "Nothing changes," she thought, "in this country life!" On the morning of Charles I.'s execution in the winters and springs when Elizabeth was Queen while Becket lay dead on Canterbury steps when Harold was on his way to Senlac that hill, that path were there sheep were climbing it, and shepherds were herding them. "It has been so since England began it will be so when I am dead. We are only shadows that pass. But England lives always always and shall live!" And still, in a trance of feeling, she feasted her eyes on the quiet country scene. The old house which Diana Mallory had just begun ', to inhabit stood upon an upland, but it was an upland so surrounded by hills to north and east and south that it seemed rather a close-girt valley, leaned over and sheltered by the downs. Pastures studded with trees sloped away from the house on all sides; the village was hidden from it by boundary woods ; only the church tower emerged. From the deep oriel window where she sat Diana could see a projecting wing of the house itself, its mellowed red brick, its Jacobean windows and roof. She could see also a corner of the moat with its running stream, a moat much older than the building it encircled, and beneath her eyes lay a small formal garden planned in the days of John Evelyn with its fountain and its sundial, and its beds in arabesque. The cold light of December lay upon it all ; there was no special beauty in the landscape, and no magnificence in the house or its 5 The Testing of Diana Mallory surroundings. But every detail of what she saw pleased the girl's taste, and satisfied her heart. All the while she was comparing it with other scenes and another land- scape, amid which she had lived till now a monotonous blue sea, mountains scorched and crumbled by the sun, dry palms in hot gardens, roads choked with dust and tormented with a plague of motor-cars, white villas crowded among high walls, a wilderness of hotels, and everywhere a chattering unlovely crowd. "Thank goodness! that's done with," she thought only to fall into a sudden remorse. "Papa papa! if you were only here tool" She pressed her hands to her eyes, which were moist with sudden tears. But the happiness in her heart over- came the pang, sharp and real as it was. Oh! how blessed to have done with the Riviera, and its hybrid empty life, for good and all! how blessed even, to have done with the Alps and Italy! how blessed, above all, to have come home! home into the heart of this Eng- lish land warm mother-heart, into which she, stranger and orphan, might creep and be at rest. The eloquence of her own thoughts possessed her. They flowed on in a warm, mute rhetoric, till suddenly the Comic Spirit was there, and patriotic rapture began to see itself. She, the wanderer, the exile, what did she know of England or England of her? What did she know of this village even, this valley in which she had pitched her tent ? She had taken an old house, because it had pleased her fancy, because it had Tudor gables, pretty panelling, and a sundial. But what natural link had she with it, or with these peasants and countrymen ? She had no true roots here. What she had done was mere whim and caprice. She was an alien, like anybody 6 The Testing of Diana Mallory else like the new men and prowling millionaires, who bought old English properties, moved thereto by a feel- ing which was none the less snobbish because it was also sentimental. She drew herself up rebelling hotly yet not seeing how to disentangle herself from these associates. And she. was still struggling to put herself back in the ro- mantic mood, and to see herself and her experiment anew in the romantic light, when her maid knocked at the door, and distraction entered with letters, and a cup of tea. An hour later Miss Mallory left her room behind her, and went tripping down the broad oak staircase of Beech- cote Manor. By this time romance was uppermost again, and self- congratulation. She was young just twenty- two; she was she knew it agreeable to look upon; she had as much money as any reasonable woman need want; she had already seen a great deal of the world outside Eng- land ; and she had fallen headlong in love with this charm- ing old house, and had now, in spite of various difficul- ties, managed to possess herself of it, and plant her life in it. Full of ghosts it might be ; but she was its living mis- tress henceforth ; nor was it either ridiculous or snobbish that she should love it and exult in it quite the contrary. And she paused on the slippery stairs, to admire the old panelled hall below, the play of wintry sunlight on the oaken surfaces she herself had rescued from desecrating paint, and the effect of some old Persian rugs, which had only arrived from London the night before, on the dark polished boards. For Diana, there were two joys con- nected with the old house: the joy of entering in, a 7 The Testing of Diana Mallory stranger and conqueror, on its guarded and matured beauty, and the joy of adding to that beauty by a deft modernness. Very deft, and tender, and skilful it must be. But no one could say that time-worn Persian rugs, with their iridescent blue and greens and rose reds or old Italian damask and cut-velvet from Genoa, or Flor- ence, or Venice were out of harmony with the charm- ing Jacobean rooms. It was the horrible furniture of the Vavasours, the ancestral possessors of the place, which had been an offence and a disfigurement. In moving it out and replacing it, Diana felt that she had become the spiritual child of the old house, in spite of her alien blood. There is a kinship not of the flesh; and it thrilled all through her. But just as her pause of daily homage to the place in which she found herself was over, and she was about to run down the remaining stairs to the dining-room, a new thought delayed her for a moment by the staircase window the thought of a lady who would no doubt be waiting for her at the breakfast-table. Mrs. Colwood, Miss Mallory's new chaperon and com- panion, had arrived the night before, on Christmas Eve. She had appeared just in time for dinner, and the two ladies had spent the evening together. Diana's first im- pressions had been pleasant yes, certainly, pleasant; though Mrs. Colwood had been shy, and Diana still more so. There could be no question but that Mrs. Col- wood was refined, intelligent, and attractive. Her gentle, almost childish looks appealed for her. So did her deep black, and the story which explained it. Diana had heard of her from a friend in Rome, where Mrs. Colwood's husband, a young Indian Civil servant, had died of fever and lung mischief, on his way to England for a long sick 8 The Testing of Diana Mallorg leave . and where the little widow had touched the hearts of all who came in contact with her. Diana thought, with one of her ready compunctions, that she had not been expansive enough the night before. She ran down-stairs, determined to make Mrs. Colwood feel at home at once. When she entered the dining-room the new companion was standing beside the window looking out upon the formal garden and the lawn beyond it. Her attitude was a little drooping, and as she turned to greet her hostess and employer, Diana's quick eyes seemed to perceive a trace of recent tears on the small face. The girl was deeply touched, though she made no sign. Poor little thing ! A widow, and childless, in a strange place. Mrs. Colwood, however, showed no further melan- choly. vShe was full of admiration for the beauty of the frosty morning, the trees touched with rime, the browns and purples of the distant woods. She spoke shyly, but winningly, of the comfort of her room, and the thoughtfulness with which Miss Mallory had arranged it; she could not say enough of the picturesqueness of the house. Yet there was nothing fulsome in her praise. She had the gift which makes the saying of sweet and flattering things appear the merest simplicity. They escaped her whether she would or no that at least was the impression; and Diana found it agreeable. So agree- ble that before they had been ten minutes at table Miss Mallory, in response, was conscious on her own part of an unusually strong wish to please her new companion to make a good effect. Diana, indeed, was naturally gov- erned by the wish to please. She desired above all things to be liked that is, if she could not be loyeci. 9 The Testing of Diana Mallory Mrs. Colwood brought with her a warm and favoring atmosphere. Diana unfolded. In the course of this first exploratory conversation, it appeared that the two ladies had many experiences in common. Mrs. Colwood had been two years, her two short years of married life, in India ; Diana had travelled there with her father. Also, as a girl, Mrs. Colwood had spent a winter at Cannes, and another at Santa Mar- gherita. Diana expressed with vehemence her weariness of the Riviera; but the fact that Mrs. Colwood differed from her led to all the more conversation. " My father would never come home," sighed Diana. " He hated the English climate, even in summer. Every year I used to beg him to let us go to England. But he never would. We lived abroad, first, I suppose, for his health, and then I can't explain it. Perhaps he thought he had been so long away he would find no old friends left. And indeed so many of them had died. But whenever I talked of it he began to look old and ill. So I never could press it never!" The girl's voice fell to a lower note musical, and full of memory. Mrs. 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. Diana insisted, first with warmth, and then with an eloquence that startled her companion, that for an Eng- 10 The Testing of Diana Mallory lishwoman to be brought up outside England, away from country and countrymen, was to waste and forego a hundred precious things that might have been gathered up. " I used to be ashamed when I talked to English people. Not that we saw many. We lived for years and years at a little villa near Rapallo, and in the summer we used to go up into the mountains, away from everybody. But after we came back from a long tour, we lived for a time at a hotel in Mentone our own little house was let and I used to talk to people there though papa never liked making friends. And I made ridiculous mistakes about English things and they'd laugh. But one can't know unless one has lived has breathed in a country, from one's birth. That's what I've lost." Mrs. Colwood demurred. "Think of the people who wish they had grown up without ever reading or hearing about the Bible, so that they might read it for the first time, when they could really understand it. You feel England all the more intensely now because you come fresh to her." Diana sprang up, with a change of face half laugh, half frown. "Yes, I feel her! Above all, I feel her enemies!" She let in her dog, a fine collie, who was scratching at the door. As she stood before the fire, holding up a biscuit for him to jump at, she turned a red and con- scious face towards her companion. The fire in the eyes, the smile on the lip seemed to say: "There! now we have come to it. This is my pas- sion -my hobby this is me!" "Her enemies! You are political?" "Desperately!" "A Tory?" ii The Testing of Diana Mallory " Fanatical. But that's only part of it, ' What should they know of England, that only England know!" 1 Miss Mallory threw back her head with a gesture that became it. "Ah, I see an Imperialist?" Diana nodded, smiling. She had seated herself in a chair by the fireside. Her dog's head was on her knees, and one of her slender hands rested on the black and tan. Mrs. Colwood admired the picture. Miss Mallory's sloping shoulders and long waist were well shown by her simple dress of black and closely fitting serge. Her head crowned and piled with curly black hair, carried itself with an amazing self-possesion and pride, which was yet all feminine. This young woman might talk politics, thought her new friend; no male man would call her prater, while she bore herself with that air. Her eyes the chaperon noticed it for the first time owed some of their remarkable intensity, no doubt, to short sight. They were large, finely colored and thickly fringed, but their slightly veiled concentration suggested an habitual, though quite unconscious struggle to see with that clear- ness which the mind behind demanded of them. The complexion was a clear brunette, the cheeks rosy; the nose was slightly tilted, the mouth fresh and beautiful though large; and the face of a lovely oval. Altogether, an aspect of rich and glowing youth : no perfect beauty ; but something arresting, ardent charged, perhaps over- charged, with personality. Mrs. Colwood said to herself that life at Beechcote would be no stagnant pool. While they lingered in the drawing-room before church, she kept Diana talking. It seemed that Miss Mallory had seen Egypt, India, and Canada, in the course of her last two years of life with her father. Their 12 The Testing of Diana Mallory travels had spread over more than a year; and Diana had brought Mr. Mallory back to the Riviera, only, it appeared, to die, after some eight months of illness. But in securing to her that year of travel, her father had bestowed his last and best gift upon her. Aided by his affection, and stimulated by his knowledge, her mind and character had rapidly developed. And, as through a natural outlet, all her starved devotion for the England she had never known, had spent itself upon the Englands she found beyond the seas; upon the hard-worked soldiers and civilians in lonely Indian stations, upon the captains of English ships, upon the pioneers of Canadian fields and railways; upon Eng- land, in fact, as the arbiter of oriental faiths the wrestler with the desert the mother and maker of new states. A passion for the work of her race beyond these narrow seas a passion of sympathy, which was also a passion of antagonism, since every phase of that work, according to Miss Mallory, had been dogged by the hate and calumny of base minds expressed itself through her charming mouth, with a quite astonishing fluency. Mrs. Colwood's mind moved uneasily. She had expected an orphan girl, ignorant of the world, whom she might mother, and perhaps mould. She found a young Egeria, talking politics with raised color and a throbbing voice, as other girls might talk of lovers or chiffons. vEgeria's companion secretly and with some alarm reviewed her own equipment in these directions. Miss Mallory dis- coursed of India. Mrs. Colwood had lived in it. But her husband had entered the Indian Civil Service, simply in order that he might have money enough to marry her. And during their short time together, they had proba- bly been more keenly alive to the depreciation of the The Testing of Diana Mallory rupee than to ideas of England's imperial mission. But Herbert had done his duty, of course he had. Once or twice as Miss Mallory talked the little widow's eyes filled with tears again unseen. The Indian names Diana threw so proudly into air were, for her companion, symbols of heart-break and death. But she played her part; and her comments and interjections were all that was necessary to keep the talk flowing. In the midst of it voices were suddenly heard outside. Diana started. "Carols!" she said, with flushing cheeks. "The first time I have heard them in England itself!" She flew to the hall, and threw the door open. A hand- ful of children appeared shouting "Good King Wences- las" in a hideous variety of keys. Miss Mallory heard them with enthusiasm ; then turned to the butler behind her. "Give them a shilling, please, Brown." A quick change passed over the countenance of the man addressed. "Lady Emily, ma'am, never gave more than three- pence." This stately person had formerly served the Vavasours, and was much inclined to let his present mistress know it. Diana looked disappointed, but submissive. "Oh, very well, Brown I don't want to alter any of the old ways. But I hear the choir will come up to-night. Now they must have five shillings and supper, please, Brown." Brown drew himself up a little more stiffly. " Lady Emily always gave 'em supper, ma'am, but, begging your pardon, she didn't hold at all with giving 'em money." 14 The Testing of Diana Mallory "Oh, I don't care!" said Miss Mallory, hastily. "I'm sure they'll like it, Brown! Five shillings, please." Brown withdrew, and Diana, with a laughing face and her hands over her ears, to mitigate the farewell bawling of the children, turned to Mrs. Colwood, with an invitation to dress for church. " The first time for me," she explained. " I have been coming up and down, for a month or more, two or three days at a time, to see to the furnishing. But now I am at home!" The Christmas service in the parish church was agree- able enough. The Beechcote pew was at the back of the church, and as the new mistress of the old house entered and walked down the aisle, she drew the eyes of a large congregation of rustics and small shopkeepers. Diana moved in a kind of happy absorption, glancing gently from side to side. This gathering of villagers was to her representative of a spiritual and national fellow- ship to which she came now to be joined. The old church, wreathed in ivy and holly; the tombs in the southern aisle ; the loaves standing near the porch for distribution after service, in accordance with an old benefaction; the fragments of fifteenth-century glass in the windows; the school-children to her left; the singing, the prayers, the sermon found her in a welcoming, a child-like mood. She knelt, she sang, she listened, like one undergoing initiation, with a tender aspiring light in her eyes, and an eager mobility of expression. Mrs. Colwood was more critical. fThe clergyman who preached the sermon did not, in fact, please her at all. He was a thin High Churchman, with an oblong face and head, narrow shoulders, and a spare frame. He wore The Testing of Diana Mallory spectacles, and his voice was disagreeably pitched. His sermon was nevertheless remarkable. A bare yet pene- trating style; a stern view of life; the voice of a prophet, and apparently the views of a socialist all these he possessed. None of them, it might have been thought, were especially fitted to capture either the female or the rustic mind. Yet it could not be denied that the congre- gation was unusually good for a village church; and by the involuntary sigh which Miss Mallory gave as the sermon ended, Mrs. Col wood was able to gauge the profound and docile attention with which one at least had listened to it. After church there was much lingering in the church- yard for the exchange of Christmas greetings. Mrs. Colwood found herself introduced to the Vicar, Mr. La very; to a couple of maiden ladies of the name of Bertram, who seemed to have a good deal to do with the Vicar, and with the Church affairs of the village; and to an elderly couple, Dr. and Mrs. Roughsedge, white- haired, courteous, and kind, who were accompanied by a soldier son, in whom it was evident they took a bound- less pride. The young man, of a handsome and open countenance, looked at Miss Mallory as much as good manners allowed. She, however, had eyes for no one but the Vicar, with whom she started, tete-a-tete, in the direc- tion of the Vicarage. Mrs. Colwood followed, shyly making acquaintance with the Roughsedges, and the elder Miss Bertram. That lady was tall, fair, and faded; she had a sharp, handsome nose, and a high forehead; and her eyes, which hardly ever met those of the person with whom she talked, gave the impression of a soul preoccupied, with few or none of the ordinary human curiosities. 16 The Testing of Diana Mallorg Mrs. Roughsedge, on the -other hand, was most human, motherly, and inquisitive. She wore two curls on either side of her face held by small combs, a large bonnet, and an ample cloak. It was clear that whatever adora- tion she could spare from her husband was lavished on her son. But there was still enough good temper and good will left to overflow upon the rest of mankind. She perceived in a moment that Mrs. Colwood was the new "companion" to the heiress, that she was a widow, and sad in spite of her cheerfulness. "Now I hope Miss Mallory is going to like us!" she said, with a touch of confidential good-humor, as she drew Mrs. Colwood a little behind the others. "We are all in love with her already. But she must be patient with us. We're very humdrum folk!" Mrs. Colwood could only say that Miss Mallory seem- ed to be in love with everything the house, the church, the village, and the neighbors. Mrs. Roughsedge shook her gray curls, smiling, as she replied that this was no doubt partly due to novelty. After her long residence abroad, Miss Mallory was it was very evident glad to come home. Poor thing she must have known a great deal of trouble an only child, and no mother! "Well, I'm sure if there's anything we can do " Mrs. Roughsedge nodded cheerfully towards her hus- band and son in front. The gesture awakened a certain natural reserve in Mrs. Colwood, followed by a quick feeling of amusement with herself that she should so soon have developed the instinct of the watch-dog. But it was not to be denied that the new mistress of Beechcote was well endowed, as single women go. Fond mothers with marriageable sons might require some handling. n The Testing of Diana Mallory But Mrs. Roughsedge's simple kindness soon baffled distrust. And Mrs. Colwood was beginning to talk freely, when suddenly the Vicar and Miss Mallory in front came to a stop. The way to the Vicarage lay along a side road. The Roughsedges also, who had walked so far for sociability's sake, must return to the village and early dinner. The party broke up. Miss Mallory, as she made her good-byes, appeared a little flushed and dis- composed. But the unconscious fire in her glance, and the vigor of her carriage, did but add to her good looks. Captain Roughsedge, as he touched her hand, asked whether he should find her at home that afternoon if he called, and Diana absently said yes. (^What a strange impracticable man!" cried Miss Mallory hotly, as the ladies turned into the Beechcote drive. " It is really a misfortune to find a man of such opinions in this place." "The Vicar?" said Mrs. Colwood, bewildered. "A Little Englander! a socialist! And so rude too! I asked him to let me help him with his poor and he threw back my offers in my face. What they wanted, he said, was not charity, but justice. And justice apparently means cutting up the property of the rich, and giving it to the poor. Is it my fault if the Vavasours neglected their cottages? I just mentioned emigration, and he foamed! I am sure he would give away the Colonies for a pinch_of soap, and abolish the Army and Navy to- morrow."^ DianaTs face glowed with indignation with wound- ed feeling besides. Mrs. Colwood endeavored to soothe her, but she remained grave and rather silent for some time. The flow of Christmas feeling and romantic pleasure had been arrested, and the memory of a harsh 18 The Testing of Diana Mallory personality haunted the day. In the afternoon, however, in the unpacking of various pretty knick-knacks, and in the putting away of books and papers, Diana recovered herself. She flitted about the house, arranging her favorite books, hanging pictures, and disposing em- broideries. The old walls glowed afresh under her hand, and from the combination of their antique beauty with her young taste, a home began to emerge, stamped with a woman's character and reflecting her enthusiasms. As she assisted in the task, Mrs. Colwood learned many things. She gathered that Miss Mallory read two or three languages, that she was passionately fond of French me- moirs and the French classics, that her father had taught her Latin and German, and guided every phase of her ed- ucation. Traces indeed of his poetic and scholarly tem- per were visible throughout his daughter's possessions so plainly, that at last as they came nearly to the end of the books, Diana's gayety once more disappeared. She moved soberly and dreamily, as though the past returned upon her ; and once or twice Mrs. Colwood came upon her standing motionless, her finger in an open book, her eyes wandering absently through the casement windows to the distant wall of hill. Sometimes, as she bent over the books and packets she would say little things, or quote stories of her father, which seemed to show a pretty wish on her part to make the lady who was now to be her companion understand something of the feelings and memories on which her life was based. But there was dignity in it all, and, besides, a fundamental awe and reserve. Mrs. Colwood seemed to see that there were remembrances connected with her father far too poignant to be touched in speech. At tea-time Captain Roughsedge appeared. Mrs. Col- 19 The Testing of Diana Mallorg wood's first impression of his good manners and good looks was confirmed. But his conversation could not be said to flow: and in endeavoring to entertain him the two ladies fought a rather uphill fight. Then Di- ana discovered that he belonged to the Sixtieth Rifles, whereupon the young lady disclosed a knowledge of the British Army, and its organization, which struck her visitor as nothing short of astounding. He listened to her open-mouthed while she rattled on, mainly to fill up the gaps in his own remarks; and when she paused, he bluntly complimented her on her information. "Oh, that was papa!" said Diana, with a smile and a sigh. " He taught me all he could about the Army, though he himself had only been a Volunteer. There was an old History of the British Army I was brought up on. It was useful when we went to India because I knew so much about the regiments we came across." This accomplishment of hers proved indeed a god- send; the young man found his tongue; and the visit ended much better than it began. As he said good-bye, he looked round the drawing- room in wonderment. "How you've altered it! The Vavasours made it hideous. But I've only been in this room twice before, though my people have lived here thirty years. We were never smart enough for Lady Emily." He colored as he spoke, and Diana suspected in him a memory of small past humiliations. Evidently he was sensitive as well as shy. "Hard work dear young man!" she said, with a smile, and a stretch, as the door closed upon him. " But after all ' que faime k militaire ' ! Now, shall we go back to work?" 20 The Testing o Diana Mallory There were still some books to unpack. Presently Mrs. Colwood found herself helping to carry a small but heavy box of papers to the sitting-room which Diana had arranged for herself next to her bedroom. Mrs. Colwood noticed that before Diana asked her assistance she dismissed her new maid, who had been till then ac- tively engaged in the unpacking. Miss Mallory herself un- locked the trunk in which the despatch-box had arrived, and took it out. The box had an old green baize cover- ing which was much frayed and worn. Diana placed it on the floor of her bedroom, where Mrs. Colwood had been helping her in various unpackings, and went away for a minute to clear a space for it in the locked wall- cupboard to which it was to be consigned. Her com- panion, left alone, happened to see that an old mended tear in the green baize had given way in Diana's handling of the box, and quite involuntarily her eyes caught a brass plate on the morocco lid, which bore the words, "Sparling papers." Diana came back at the moment, and perceived the uncovered label. She flushed a little, hesitated, and then said, looking first at the label and then at Mrs. Colwood : " I think I should like you to know my name was not always Mallory. We were Sparlings but my father took the name of Mallory after my mother's death. It was his mother's name, and there was an old Mallory uncle who left him a prop- erty. I believe he was glad to change his name. He never spoke to me of any Sparling relations. He was an only child, and I always suppose his father must have been very unkind to him and that they quarrelled. At any rate, he quite dropped the name, and never would let me speak of it. My mother had hardly any relations either only one sister who married and went ax The Testing of Diana Mallorij to Barbadoes. So our old name was very soon forgotten. And please" she looked up appealingly "now that I have told you, will you forget it too ? It always seem- ed to hurt papa to hear it, and I never could bear to do or say anything that gave him pain." She spoke with a sweet seriousness. Mrs. Colwood, who had been conscious of a slight shock of puzzled recollection, gave an answer which evidently pleased Diana, for the girl held out her hand and pressed that of her companion; then they carried the box to its place, and were leaving the room, when suddenly Diana, with a joyous exclamation, pounced on a book which was lying on the floor, tumbled among a dozen others recently unpacked. "Mr. Marsham's Rossetti! I am glad, Now I can face him!" She looked up all smiles. " Do you know that I am going to take you to a party next week? to the Marshams? They live near here at Tallyn Hall. They have asked us for two nights Thursday to Saturday. I hope you won't mind." "Have I got a dress?" said Mrs. Colwood, anxiously. "Oh, that doesn't matter! not at the Marshams. I am glad!" repeated Diana, fondling the book " If I really had lost it, it would have given him a horrid advantage !" "Who is Mr. Marsham?" " A gentleman we got to know at Rapallo," said Diana, still smiling to herself. " He and his mother were there last winter. Father and I quarrelled with him all day long. He is the worst Radical I ever met, but " "But? but agreeable?" " Oh yes," said Diana, uncertainly, and Mrs. Colwood thought she colored "oh yes agreeable!" 22 The Testing of Diana Mallorg "And he lives near here?" " He is the member for the division. Such a crew as we shall meet there!" Diana laughed out. "I had better warn you. But they have been very kind. They called directly they knew I had taken the house. 'They' means Mr. Oliver Marsham and his mother. I am glad I've found his book!" She went off embracing it. Mrs. Colwood was left with two impressions one sharp, the other vague. One was that Mr. Oliver Marsham might easily become a personage in the story of which she had just, as it were, turned the first leaf. The other was connected with the name on the despatch-box. Why did it haunt her ? It had produced a kind of indis- tinguishable echo in the brain, to which she could put no words which was none the less dreary; like a voice of wailing from a far-off past. CHAPTER II DURING the days immediately following her arrival at Beechcote, Mrs. Colwood applied herself to a study of Miss Mallory and her surroundings none the less penetrating because the student was modest and her method unperceived. She divined a nature unworldly, impulsive, steeped, moreover, for all its spiritual and intellectual force, which was considerable, in a kind of sensuous romance much connected with concrete things and symbols, places, persons, emblems, or relics, any contact with which might at any time bring the color to the girl's cheeks and the tears to her eyes. Honor personal or national the word was to Diana like a spark to dry leaves. Her whole nature flamed to it, and there were moments when she walked visibly transfigured in the glow of it. Her mind was rich, moreover, in the delicate, inchoate lovers, the half-poetic, half-intellectual passions, the mystical yearnings and aspirations, which haunt a pure expanding youth. Such human beings, Mrs. Colwood reflected, are not generally made for hap- piness. But there were also in Diana signs both of practical ability and of a rare common-sense. Would this last avail to protect her from her enthusiasms? Mrs. Colwood remembered a famous Frenchwoman of whom it was said: "Her judgment is infallible her conduct one long mistake!" The little companion was already sufficiently attached to Miss Mallory to hope 24 The Testing of* Diana Mallory that in this case a natural tact and balance might not be thrown away. As to suitors and falling in love, the natural accom- paniments of such a charming youth, Mrs. Colwood came across no traces of anything of the sort. During her journey with her father to India, Japan, and America, Miss Mallory had indeed for the first time seen some- thing of society. But in the villa beside the Mediter- ranean it was evident that her life with her father had been one of complete seclusion. She and he had lived for each other. Books, sketching, long walks, a friendly interest in their peasant neighbors these had filled their time. It took, indeed, but a short time to discover in Miss Mallory a hunger for society which seemed to be the natural result of long starvation. With her neighbors the Roughsedges she was already on the friendliest terms. To Dr. Roughsedge, who was infirm, and often a prisoner to his library, she paid many small attentions which soon won the heart of an old student. She was in love with Mrs. Roughsedge's gray curls and motherly ways; and would consult her about servants and tradesmen with an eager humility. She liked the son, it seemed, for the parents' sake, nor was it long before he was allowed at his own pressing request to help in hanging pictures and arranging books at Beechcote. A girl's manner with young men is always a matter of interest to older women. Mrs. Colwood thought that Diana's manner to the young soldier could not have been easily bettered. It was frank and gay with just that tinge of old- fashioned reserve which might be thought natural in a girl of gentle breeding, brought up alone by a fastidious father. With all her impetuosity, indeed, there was The Testing of Diana Mallorg about her something markedly virginal and remote, which is commoner, perhaps, in Irish than English women. Mrs. Colwood watched the effect of it on Captain Roughsedge. After her third day of acquaint- ance with him, she said to herself: " He will fall in love with her!" But she said it with compassion, and with- out troubling to speculate on the lady. Whereas, with regard to the Marsham visit, she already she could hardly have told why found herself full of curiosity. Meanwhile, in the few days which elapsed before that visit was due, Diana was much called on by the country- side. The girl restrained her restlessness, and sat at home, receiving everybody with a friendliness which might have been insipid but for its grace and spontane- ity. She disliked no one, .was bored by no one. The joy of her home-coming seemed to halo them all. Even the sour Miss Bertrams could not annoy her; she thought them sensible and clever ; even the tiresome Mrs. Minchin of Minchin Hall, the "gusher" of the county, who "adored" all mankind and ill-treated her step-daughter, even she was dubbed "very kind," till Mrs. Roughsedge, next day, kindled a passion in the girl's eyes by some tales of the step-daughter. Mrs. Colwood wondered whether, indeed, she could be bored, as Mrs. Minchin had not achieved it. Those who talk easily and well, like Diana, are less keenly aware, she thought, of the plati- tudes of their neighbors. They are not defenceless, like the shy and the silent. Nevertheless, it was clear that if Diana welcomed the neighbors with pleasure she often saw them go with relief. As soon as the house was clear of them, she would stand pensively by the fire, looking down into the blaze like one on whom a dream suddenly descends then 26 The Testing of Diana Mallort^ would often call her dog, and go out alone, into the winter twilight. From these rambles she would return grave sometimes with reddened eyes. But at all times, as Mrs. Col wood soon began to realize, there was but a thin line of division between her gayety and some inexplicable sadness, some unspoken grief, which seemed to rise upon her and overshadow her, like a cloud tangled in the woods of spring. Mrs. Colwood could only suppose that these times of silence and eclipse were connected in some way with her father and her loss of him. But whenever they occurred, Mrs. Colwood found her own mind in- vincibly recalled to that name on the box of papers, which still haunted her, still brought with it a vague sense of something painful and harrowing a breath of desolation, in strange harmony, it often seemed, with certain looks and moods of Diana. But Mrs. Colwood searched her memory in vain. And, indeed, after a lit- tle while, some imperious instinct even forbade her the search so rapid and strong was the growth of sympathy with the young life which had called her to its aid. The day of the Marsham visit arrived a January afternoon clear and frosty. In the morning before they were to start, Diana seemed to be often closeted with her maid, and once in passing Miss Mallory's open door, her companion could not help seeing a consultation going on, and a snowy white dress, with black ribbons, lying on the bed. Heretofore Diana had only appeared in black, the strict black which French dressmakers understand, for it was little more than a year since her father's death. The thought of seeing her in white stirred Mrs. Col wood's expectations. Tallyn Hall was eight miles^ fro,m Beechcote. The 27 The Testing of Diana Mallorij ladies were to drive, but in order to show Mrs. Colwood something of the country, Diana decreed that they should walk up to the downs by a field path, meeting the carriage which bore their luggage at a convenient point on the main road. The day was a day of beauty the trees and grass lightly rimed, the air sparkling and translucent. Nature was held in the rest of winter ; but beneath the outward stillness, one caught as it were the strong heart-beat of the mighty mother. Diana climbed the steep down without a pause, save when she turned round from time to time to help her companion. Her slight firm frame, the graceful decision of her movements, the ab- sence of all stress and effort showed a creature accus- tomed to exercise and open air; Mrs. Colwood, the frail Anglo-Indian to whom walking was a task, tried to rival her in vain; and Diana was soon full of apologies and remorse for having tempted her to the climb. "Please! please!" the little lady panted, as they reached the top "wasn't this worth it?" For they stood in one of the famous wood and com- mon lands of Southern England great beeches tower- ing overhead glades opening to right and left ferny paths over green turf-tracks, and avenues of imme- morial age, the highways of a vanished life old earth- works, overgrown lanes deep-sunk in the chalk where the pack-horses once made their way gnarled thorns, bent with years, yet still white-mantled in the spring: a wild, enchanted no-man's country, owned it seemed by rabbits and birds, solitary, lovely, and barren yet from its furthest edge, the high spectator, looking eastward, on a clear night, might see on the horizon the dim flare of London. 28 The Testing of Diana Maliory Diana's habitual joy broke out, as she stood gazing at the village below, the walls and woods of Beech- cote, the church, the plough-lands, and the far- western plain, drawn in pale grays and purples under the de- clining sun. " Isn't it heavenly ! the browns the blues the soberness, the delicacy of it all? Oh, so much better than any tiresome Mediterranean any stupid Riviera! Ah!" She stopped and turned, checked by a sound behind her. Captain Roughsedge appeared, carrying his gun, his spaniel beside him. He greeted the ladies with what seemed to Mrs. Colwood a very evident start of pleasure, and turned to walk with them. "You have been shooting?" said Diana. He admitted it. "That's what you enjoy?" He flushed. "More than anything in the world." But he looked at his questioner a little askance, as though uncertain how she might take so gross a con- fession. Diana laughed, and hoped he got as much as he desired. Then he was not like his father who cared so much for books ? "Oh, books!" He shrugged his shoulders. "Well, the fact is, I I don't often read if I can help it. But of course they make you do a lot of it with these beastly examinations. They've about spoiled the army with them." " You wouldn't do it for pleasure ?" "What reading?" He shook his head decidedly. " Not while I could be doing anything else." 29 The Testing of Diana Mallory "Not history or poetry?" He looked at her again nervously. But the girl's face was gay, and he ventured on the truth. "Well, no, I can't say I do. My father reads a deal of poetry aloud." "And it bores you?" "Well, I don't understand it," he said, slowly and candidly. "Don't you even read the papers?" asked Diana, wondering. He started. "Why, I should think I do!" he cried. "I should rather think I do! That's another thing altogether that's not books." "Then perhaps you read the debate last night?" She looked at him with a kindling eye. "Of course I did every word of it! Do you know what those Radical fellows are up to now? They'll never rest until we've lost the Khaibar and then the Lord only knows what '11 happen." Diana flew into discussion quick breath, red cheeks! Mrs. Colwood looked on amazed. Presently both appealed to her, the Anglo-Indian. But she smiled and stammered declining the challenge. Beside their eagerness, their passion, she felt herself tongue-tied. Captain Roughsedge had seen two years' service on the Northwest Frontier; Diana had ridden through the Khaibar with her father and a Lieutenant- Go vernor. In both the sense of England's historic task as the guardian of a teeming India against onslaught from the north, had sunk deep, not into brain merely. Figures of living men, acts of heroism and endurance, the thought of English soldiers ambushed in mountain de- 30 The Testing of Diana Mallory files, or holding out against Afridi hordes in lonely forts, dying and battling, not for themselves, but that the great mountain barrier might hold against the savagery of the north, and English honor and English power maintain themselves unscathed these had mingled, in both, with the chivalry and the red blood of youth. The eyes of both had seen; the hearts of both had felt. And now, in the English House of Commons, there were men who doubted and sneered about these things who held an Afridi life dearer than an English one who cared nothing for the historic task, who would let India go to-morrow without a pang! Misguided recreants! But Mrs. Colwood, looking on, could only feel that had they never played their impish part, the winter afternoon for these two companions of hers would have been infinitely less agreeable. For certainly denunication and argument became Diana-^-all the more that she was no "female franzy" who must have all the best of the talk ; she listened she evoked she drew on, and drew out. Mrs. Colwood was secretly sure that this very modest and ordinarily stupid young man had never talked so well before, that his mother would have been astonished could she have be- held him. What had come to the young women of this generation! Their grandmothers cared for politics only so far as they advanced the fortunes of their lords other- wise what was Hecuba to them, or they to Hecuba? But these women have minds for the impersonal. Diana was not talking to make an effect on Captain Roughsedge that was the strange part of it. Hundreds of women can make politics serve the primitive woman's game; the " come hither in the ee " can use that weapon as well 3 1 The Testing of Diana Mallory as any other. But here was an intellectual, a patriotic passion, veritable, genuine, not feigned. Well ! the spectator admitted it unwillingly so long as the debater, the orator, were still desirable, still lovely. She stole a glance at Captain Roughsedge. Was he, too, so unconscious of sex, of opportunity ? Ah ! that she doubted! The young man plaj^ed his part stoutly; flung back the ball without a break; but there were glances, and movements and expressions, which to this shrewd feminine eye appeared to betray what no scrutiny could detect in Diana a pleasure within a pleasure, and thoughts behind thoughts. At any rate, he prolonged the walk as long as it could be prolonged; he accompanied them to the very door of their carriage, and would have delayed them there but that Diana looked at her watch in dismay. "You'll hear plenty of that sort of stuff to-night!" he said, as he helped them to their wraps. " ' Perish India!' and all the rest of it. All they'll mind at Tallyn will be that the Afridis haven't killed a few more Brit- ishers." Diana gave him a rather grave smile and bow as the carriage drove on. Mrs. Colwood wondered whether the Captain's last remark had somehow offended her com- panion. But Miss Mallory made no reference to it. Instead, she began to give her companion some pre- liminary 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 32 The Testing of! Diana Mallory inmate of the house. Mrs. Fotheringham was if possible more extreme in opinions than her brother, frequented platforms, had quarrelled with all her Conservative re- lations, including a family of stepsons, and supported Women's Suffrage. It was evident that Diana was steel- ing herself to some endurance in this quarter. As to the other guests whom they might expect, Diana knew little. She had heard that Mr. Ferrier was to be there ex- V- Home Secretary, and now leader of the Opposition and old Lady Niton. Diana retailed what gossip she knew of this rather famous personage, whom three-fourths of the world found insolent and the rest witty. "They say, anyway, that she can snub Mrs. Fotheringham," said Diana, laughing. "You met them abroad?" "Only Mr. Marsham and Lady Lucy. Papa and I were walking over the hills at Portofmo. We fell in with him, and he asked us the way to San Fruttuoso. We were going there, so we showed him. Papa liked him, and he came to see us afterwards several times. Lady Lucy came once." "She is nice?" "Oh yes," said Diana, vaguely, "she is quite beautiful for her age. You never saw such lovely hands. And so fastidious so dainty! I remember feeling uncomfort- able all the time, because I knew I had a tear in my dress, and my hair was untidy and I was certain she noticed." " It's all rather alarming," said Mrs. Colwood, smiling. " No, no !" Diana turned upon her eagerly. " They're very kind very, very kind!" The winter day was nearly gone when they reached 33 The Testing of Diana Mallory their destination. But there was just light enough, as they stepped out of the carriage, to show a large mod- ern building, built of red brick, with many gables and bow-windows, and a generally restless effect. As they followed the butler through the outer hall, a babel of voices made itself heard, and when he threw open the door into the inner hall, they found themselves ushered into a large party. There was a pleased exclamation from a tall fair man standing near the fire, who came forward at once to meet them. "So glad to see you! But we hoped for you earlier! Mother, here is Miss Mallory." Lady Lucy, a woman of sixty, still slender and stately, greeted them kindly, Mrs. Colwood was introduced, and room was made for the new-comers in the circle round the tea-table, which was presided over by a lady with red hair and an eye-glass, who gave a hand to Diana, and a bow, or more precisely a nod, to Mrs. Colwood. '* I'm Oliver's sister my name's Fotheringham. That's my cousin Madeleine Varley. Madeleine, find me some cups! This is Mr. Ferrier Mr. Ferrier, Miss Mallory. I expect you know Lady Niton. Sir James Chide, Miss Mallory. Perhaps that '11 do to begin with!" said Mrs. Fotheringham, carelessly, glancing at a further group of people. "Now I'll give you some tea." Diana sat down, very shy, and a little flushed. Mr. Marsham hovered about her, inducing her to loosen her furs, bringing her tea, and asking questions about her settlement at Beechcote. He showed also a marked courtesy to Mrs. Colwood, and the little widow, suscept- ible to every breath of kindness, formed the prompt opinion that he was both handsome and agreeable. 34 The Testing of Diana Mallory Oliver Mar sham, indeed, was not a person to be over- looked. His height was about six foot three; and his long slender limbs and spare frame had earned him, as a lad, among the men of his father's works, the descrip- tion of " two yards o' pump-waater, straight oop an' down." But in his thin lengthiness there was nothing awkward rather a graceful readiness and vigor. And the head which surmounted this lightly built body gave to the whole personality the force and weight it might otherwise have missed. The hair was very thick and very fair, though already slightly grizzled. It lay in heavy curly masses across a broad head, defining a strong brow above deeply set small eyes of a pale con- spicuous blue. The nose, aquiline and large; the mouth large also, but thin-lipped and flexible; slight hollows in the cheeks, and a long, lantern jaw. The whole figure made an impression of ease, power, and self-con- fidence i j "So you like your old house?" he said, presently, to Diana, sitting down beside her, and dropping his voice a little. " It suits me perfectly." "I am certain the moat is rheumatic! But you will never admit it." "I would, if it were true," she said, smiling. " No ! you are much too romantic. You see, I re- member our conversations." "Did I never admit the truth?" " You would never admit it was the truth. And my difficulty was to find an arbiter between us." Diana's face changed a little. He perceived it in- stantly. 'Your father was sometimes arbiter," he said, in a 35 The Testing of Diana Mallorg still lower tone "but naturally he took your side. I shall always rejoice I had that chance of meeting him." Diana said nothing, but her dark eyes turned on him with a soft friendly look. His own smiled in response, and he resumed: " I suppose you don't know many of these people here?" "Not any." " I'm sure you'll like Mr. Ferrier. He is our very old friend almost my guardian. Of course on politics you won't agree!" " I didn't expect to agree with anybody here," said Diana, slyly. He laughed. " I might offer you Lady Niton but I refrain. To- morrow I have reason to believe that two Tories are coming to dinner." "Which am I to admire? your liberality, or their courage?" " I have matched them by two socialists. Which will you sit next?" "Oh, I am proof!" said Diana. "'Come one, come all.'" He looked at her smilingly. " Is it always the same ? Are you still in love with all the dear old abuses?" "And do you still hate everything that wasn't made last week?" "Oh no! We only hate what cheats or oppresses the people." "The people?" echoed Diana, with an involuntary lift of the eyebrows, and she looked round the immense hall, with its costly furniture, its glaring electric lights, 36 The Testing of Diana Mallory and the band of bad fresco which ran round its lower walls. Oliver Marsham reddened a little; then said: "I see my cousin Miss Drake. May I introduce her? Alicia!" A young lady had entered, from a curtained archway dividing the hall from a passage beyond. She paused a moment examining the company. The dark curtain behind her made an effective background for the brill- iance of her hair, dress, and complexion, of which fact such at least was Diana's instant impression she was most composedly aware. At least she lingered a few leisurely seconds, till everybody in the hall had had the opportunity of marking her entrance. Then beckoned by Oliver Marsham, she moved toward Diana. " How do you do ? I suppose you've had a long drive ? Don't you hate driving?" And without waiting for an answer, she turned af- fectedly away, and took a place at the tea-table where room had been made for her by two young men. Reach- ing out a white hand, she chose a cake, and began to nibble it slowly, her elbows resting on the table, the ruffles of white lace falling back from her bare and rounded arms. Her look meanwhile, half absent, half audacious, seemed to wander round the persons near, as though she saw them, without taking any real account of them. "What have you been doing, Alicia, all this time?" said Marsham, as he handed her a cup of tea. " Dressing." An incredulous shout from the table. "Since lunch!" Miss Drake nodded. Lady Lucy put in an explana- 37 The Testing of Diana Mallorg tory remark about a "dressmaker from town," but was not heard. The table was engaged in watching the new- comer. "May we congratulate you on the result?" said Mr. Ferrier, putting up his eye-glass. " If you like," said Miss Drake, indifferently, still gently munching at her cake. Then suddenly she smiled a glittering infectious smile, to which unconsciously all the faces near her responded. " I have been read- ing the book you lent me!" she said, addressing Mr. Ferrier. "Well?" " I'm too stupid I can't understand it." Mr. Ferrier laughed. " I'm afraid that excuse won't do, Miss Alicia. You must find another." She was silent a moment, finished her cake, then took some grapes, and began to play with them in the same conscious provocative way till at last she turned upon her immediate neighbor, a young barrister with a broad boyish face. "Well, I wonder whether you'd mind?" "Mind what?" " If your father had done something shocking forged or murdered or done something of that kind suppos- ing, of course, he were dead." "Do you mean if I suddenly found out?" She nodded assent. "Well!" he reflected; "it would be disagreeable!" " Yes but would it make you give up all the things you like? golfing and cards and parties and the girl you were engaged to and take to slumming, and that kind of thing?" 38 The Testing of Diana Mallory The slight inflection of the last words drew smiles. Mr. Ferrier held up a finger. "Miss Alicia, I shall lend you no more books." "Why? Because I can't appreciate them?" Mr. Ferrier laughed. " I maintain that book is a book to melt the heart of a stone." " Well, I tried to cry," said the girl, putting another grape into her mouth, and quietly nodding at her in- terlocutor " I did honor bright. But really what does it matter what your father did?" "My dear!" said Lady Lucy, softly. Her singularly white and finely wrinkled face, framed in a delicate capote of old lace, looked coldly at the speaker. " By- the- way," said Mr. Ferrier, " does not the ques- tion rather concern you in this neighborhood? I hear young Brenner has just come to live at West Hill. I don't now what sort of a youth he is, but if he's a decent fellow, I don't imagine anybody will boycott him on account of his father's misdoings." He referred to one of the worst financial scandals of the preceding generation. Lady Lucy made no answer, but any one closely observing her might have noticed a sudden and sharp stiffening of the lips, which was in truth her reply. "Oh, you can always ask a man like that to garden- parties!" said a shrill, distant voice. The group round the table turned. The remark was made by old Lady Niton, who sat enthroned in an arm-chair near the fire, sometimes knitting, and sometimes observing her neigh- bors with a malicious eye. " Anything's good enough, isn't it, for garden-parties ?" said Mrs. Fotheringham, with a little sneer. 39 The Testing of Diana Mallorg Lady Niton's face kindled. " Let us be Radicals, my dear," she said, briskly, "but not hypocrites. Garden- parties are invaluable for people you can't ask into the house. By-the-way, wasn't it you, Oliver, who scolded me last night, because I said somebody wasn't 'in Society'?" " You said it of a particular hero of mine," laughed Marsham. "I naturally pitied Society." "What is Society? Where is it?" said Sir James Chide, contemptuously. "I suppose Lady Palmerston knew." The famous lawyer sat a little apart from the rest. Diana, who had only caught his name, and knew nothing else of him, looked with sudden interest at the man's great brow and haughty look. Lady Niton shook her head emphatically. "We know quite as well as she did. Society is just as strong and just as exclusive as it ever was. But it is clever enough now to hide the fact from outsiders." " I am afraid we must agree that standards have been much relaxed," said Lady Lucy. "Not at all not at all!" cried Lady Niton. "There were black sheep then; and there are black sheep now." Lady Lucy held her own. " I am sure that people take less care in their invita- tions," she said, with soft obstinacy. "I have often heard my mother speak of society in her young days, how the dear Queen's example purified it and how much less people bowed down to money then than now." "Ah, that was before the Americans and the Jews," said Sir James Chide. " People forget their responsibility," said Lady Lucy, turning to Diana, and speaking so as not to be heard by 40 The Testing of Diana Mallorg the whole table. " In old days it was birth; but now now when we are all democratic it should be character. Don't you agree with me?" "Other people's character?" asked Diana. "Oh, we mustn't be unkind, of course. But when a thing is notorious. Take this young Brenner. His father's frauds ruined hundreds of poor people. How can I receive him here, as if nothing had happened ? It ought not to be forgotten. He himself ought to wish to live quietly!" Diana gave a hesitating assent, adding: "But I'm sorry for Mr. Brenner!" Mr. Ferrier, as she spoke, leaned slightly across the tea-table as though to listen to what she said. Lady Lucy moved away, and Mr. Ferrier, after spending a moment of quiet scrutiny on the young mistress of Beech- cote, came to sit beside her. Mrs. Fotheringham threw herself back in her chair with a little yawn. " Mamma is more difficult than the Almighty!" she .said, in a loud aside to Sir James Chide. " One sin or even somebody else's sin and you are done for." Sir James, who was a Catholic, and scrupulous in speech, pursed his lips slightly, drummed on the table with his fingers, and finally rose without reply, and betook himself to the Times. Miss Drake meanwhile had been carried off to play billiards at the farther end of the hall by the young men of the party. It might have been noticed that, before she went, she had spent a few minutes of close though masked observation of her cousin Oliver's new friend. Also, that she tried to carry Oliver Marsham with her, but unsuccessfully. He had returned to Diana's neighborhood, and stood leaning 4 41 The Testing of Diana Mallory over a. chair beside her, listening to her conversation with Mr. Ferrier. His sister, Mrs. Fotheringham, was not content to listen. Diana's impressions of the country-side, which presently caught her ear, evidently roused her pugnacity. She threw herself on all the girl's rose-colored appre- ciations with a scorn hardly disguised. All the " locals, " according to her, were stupid or snobbish bores, in fact, of the first water. And to Diana's discomfort and amaze- ment, Oliver Marsham joined in. He showed himself possessed of a sharper and more caustic tongue than Diana had yet suspected. His sister's sallies only amused him, and sometimes he improved on them, with epithets or comments, shrewder than hers indeed, but quite as biting. "His neighbors and constituents!" thought Diana, in a young astonishment. "The people who send him to Parliament!" Mr. Ferrier seemed to become aware of her surprise and disapproval, for he once or twice threw in a satirical word or two, at the expense, not of the criticised, but of the critics. The well-known Leader of the Opposi- tion was a stout man of middle height, with a round head and face, at first sight wholly undistinguished, an ample figure, and smooth, straight hair. But there was so much honesty and acuteness in the eyes, so much humor in the mouth, and so much kindness in the general aspect, that Diana felt herself at once attracted; and when the master of the house was summoned by his head gamekeeper to give directions for the shooting- party of the following day, and Mrs. Fotheringham had gone off to attend what seemed to be a vast correspond- ence, the politician and the young girl fell into a con- 42 The Testing of Diaria Mallorg versation which soon became agreeable and even absorb- ing to both. Mrs. Colwood, sitting on the other side of the hall, timidly discussing fancy work with the Miss Varleys, Lady Lucy's young nieces, saw that Diana was making a conquest; and it seemed to her, moreover, that Mr. Ferrier's scrutiny of his companion was somewhat more attentive and more close than was quite explained by the mere casual encounter of a man of middle-age with a young and charming girl. Was he like herself aware that matters of moment might be here at their be- ginningj) Meanwhile, if Mr. Ferrier was making discoveries, so was Diana. A man, it appeared, could be not only one of the busiest and most powerful politicians in England, but also a philosopher, and a reader, one whose secret tastes were as unworldly and romantic as her own. Books, music, art he could handle these subjects no less skil- fully than others political or personal. And, throughout, his deference to a young and pretty woman was never at fault. Diana was encouraged to talk, and then, without a word of flattery, given to understand that her talk pleased. Under this stimulus, her soft dark beauty was soon glowing at its best; innocence, intelligence, and youth, spread as it were their tendrils to the sun. Meanwhile, Sir James Chide, a few yards off, was apparently absorbed partly in the Times, partly in the endeavor to make Lady Lucy's fox terrier go through its tricks. VjDnce Mr. Ferrier drew Diana's attention to her neigh- bor. "You know him?" " I never saw him before." "You know who he is?" 43 The Testing of Diana Mallory "Ought I? I am so sorry!" " He is perhaps the greatest criminal advocate we have. And a very distinguished politician too. When- ever our party comes in, he will be in the Cabinet. You must make him talk this evening." " I?" said Diana, laughing and blushing. "You can!" smiled Mr. Ferrier. "Witness how you have been making me chatter! But I think I read you right ? You do not mind if one chatters ? if one gives you information?" "Mind! How could I be anything but grateful? It puzzles me so this " she hesitated. " This English life ? especially the political life ? Well! let me be your guide. I have been in it for a long while." Diana thanked him, and rose. " You want your room ?" he asked her, kindly. " Mrs. Fotheringham, I think, is in the drawing-room. Let me take you to her. But, first, look at two or three of these pictures as you go." "These pictures?" faltered Diana, looking round her, her tone changing. "Oh, not those horrible frescos! Those were per- petrated by Marsham's father. They represent, as you see, the different processes of the Iron Trade. Old Henry Marsham liked them, because, as he said, they explained him, and the house. Oliver would like to whitewash them but for filial piety. People might suppose him ashamed of his origin. No, no! I mean those two or three old pictures at the end of the room. Come and look at them they are on our way." He led her to inspect them. They proved to be two Gainsboroughs and a Raeburn, representing ancestors on 44 The Testing of Diana Mallorij Lady Lucy's side. Mr. Ferrier's talk of them showed his intimate knowledge both of Varleys and Marshams, the knowledge rather of a kinsman than a friend. Diana perceived, indeed, how great must be the affection, the intimacy, between him and them. Meanwhile, as the man of fifty and the slender girl in black passed before him, on their way to examine \ the pictures ,/Sir James Chide, casually looking up, was \ apparently struck by some rapid and powerful impres- sion. It arrested the hand playing with the dog; it held and transformed the whole man. His eyes, open as though in astonishment or pain, followed every move- ment of Diana, scrutinized every look and gesture. His face had flushed slightly his lips were parted. He had the aspect of one trying eagerly, passionately, to follow up some clew that would not unwind itself; and every now and then he bent forward listening trying to catch her voice. Presently the inspection was over. Diana turned and beckoned to Mrs. Colwood. The two ladies went toward the drawing-room, Mr. Ferrier showing the way. When he returned to the hall, Sir James Chide, its sole occupant, was walking up and down. "Who was that young lady?" said Sir James, turning abruptly. "Isn't she charming? Her name is Mallory and she has just settled at Beechcote, near here. That small fair lady was her companion. Oliver tells me she is an orphan well off with no kith or kin. She has just come to England, it seems, for the first time. Her father ' brought her up abroad away from everybody. She will have a success I But of all the little Jingoes!" 45 The Testing of Diana Mallorg Mr. Ferrier's face expressed an amused recollection of some of Diana's speeches. "Mallory?" said Sir James, under his breath " Mallory f" He walked to the window, and stood look- ing out, his hands in his pockets. Mr. Ferrier went up-stairs to write letters. In a few minutes the man at the window came slowly back tow- ard the fire, staring at the ground. "The look in the eyes!" he said to himself "the mouth! the voice!" He stood by the vast and pompous fireplace hanging over the blaze the prey of some profound agitation, some flooding onset of memory. Servants passed and repassed through the hall; sounds loud and merry came from the drawing-room. Sir James neither saw nor heard. CHAPTER III ALICIA DRAKE a vision of pale pink had just 2~\ appeared in the long gallery at Tallyn, on her way to dinner. Her dress, her jewels, and all her minor ap- pointments were of that quality and perfection to which only much thought and plentiful money can attain. She had not, in fact, been romancing in that account of her afternoon which has been already quoted. Dress was her weapon and her stock in trade; it was, she said, necessary to her " career." And on this plea she steadily exacted in its support a proportion of the family income which left but small pickings for the schooling of her younger brothers and the allowances of her two younger sisters. But so great were the indulgence and the pride of her parents small Devonshire land-owners living on an impoverished estate that Alicia's demands were con- ceded without a murmur. They themselves were in- significant folk, who had, in their own opinion, failed in life ; and most of their children seemed to them to possess the same ineffective qualities or the same absence of qualities as themselves. But Alicia represented their one chance of something brilliant and interesting, some- thing to lift them above their neighbors and break up the monotony of their later lives. Their devotion was a strange mixture of love and selfishness; at any rate, Alicia could always feel, and did always feel, that she was playing her family's game as well as her own. 47 The Testing of Diana Mallory Her own game, of course, came first. She was not a beauty, in the sense in which Diana Mallory was a beauty; and of that fact she had been perfectly aware after her first apparently careless glance at the new- comer of the afternoon. But she had points that never failed to attract notice: a free and rather insolent carriage, audaciously beautiful eyes, a general roundness and softness, and a grace unfailing, deliberate, and prov- ocative, even in actions, morally, the most graceless that would have alone secured her the "career" on which she was bent. Of her mental qualities, one of the most profitable was a very shrewd power of observation. As she swept slowly along the corridor, which overlooked the hall at Tallyn, none of the details of the house were lost upon her. Tallyn was vast, ugly above all, rich. Henry Marsham, the deceased husband of Lady Lucy and father of Oliver and Mrs. Fotheringham, had made an enormous fortune in the Iron Trade of the north, retiring at sixty that he might enjoy some of those pleasures of life for which business had left him too little time. One of these pleasures was building. Henry Marsham had spent ten years in building Tallyn, and at the end of that time, feeling it impossible to live in the huge incoherent place he had created, he hired a small villa at Nice and went to die there in privacy and peace. Nevertheless, his will laid strict injunctions upon his widow to in- habit and keep up Tallyn; injunctions backed by con- siderable sanctions of a financial kind. His will, indeed, had been altogether a document of some eccentricity; though as eight years had now elapsed since his death, the knowledge of its provisions possessed by outsiders had had time to grow vague. Still, there were strong 48 The Testing of Diana Mallory general impressions abroad, and as Alicia Drake surveyed the house which the old man had built to be the incubus of his descendants, some of them teased her mind. It was said, for instance, that Oliver Marsham and his sister only possessed pittances of about a thousand a year apiece, while Tallyn, together with the vast bulk of Henry Mar- ... sham's fortune, had been willed to Lady Lucy, and lay, moreover, at her absolute disposal. Was this so, or no? Miss Drake's curiosity, for some time past, would have been glad to be informed. Meanwhile, here was the house about which there was no mystery least of all, as to its cost. Inter- minable broad corridors, carpeted with ugly Brussels and suggesting a railway hotel, branched out before Miss Drake's eyes in various directions; upon them opened not bedrooms but "suites," as Mr. Marsham pere had loved to call them, of which the number was legion, while the bachelors' wing alone would have lodged a regiment. Every bedroom was like every other, except for such variations as Tottenham Court Road, rioting at will, could suggest. Copies in marble or bronze of well- known statues ranged along the corridors a forlorn troupe of nude and shivering divinities. The immense hall below, with its violent frescos and its brand-new Turkey carpets, was panelled in oak, from which some device of stain or varnish had managed to abstract every particle of charm. A whole oak wood, indeed, had been lavished on the swathing and sheathing of the house, with the only result that the spectator beheld it steeped in a repellent yellow-brown from top to toe, against which no ornament, no piece of china, no picture, even did they possess some individual beauty, could possibly make it prevail. 49 The Testing of Diana Mallory And the drawing-room! As Alicia Drake advanced alone into its empty and blazing magnificence she could only laugh in its face so eager and restless was the effort which it made, and so hopeless the defeat. Enor- mous mirrors, spread on white and gold walls; large copies from Italian pictures, collected by Henry Marsham in Rome; more facile statues holding innumerable lights; great pieces of modern china painted with realistic roses and poppies; crimson carpets, gilt furniture, and flaring cabinets Miss Drake frowned as she looked at it. "What could be done with it?" she said to herself, walk- ing slowly up and down, and glancing from side to side "What could be done with it?" A rustle in the hall announced another guest. Mrs. Fotheringham entered. Marsham's sister dressed with severity; and as she approached her cousin she put up her eye-glass for what was evidently a hostile inspection of the dazzling effect presented by the young lady. But Alicia was not afraid of Mrs. Fotheringham. "How early we are!" she said, still quietly looking at the reflection of herself in the mirror over the mantel- piece and warming a slender foot at the fire. " Haven't some more people arrived, Cousin Isabel? I thought I heard a carriage while I was dressing." "Yes; Miss Vincent and three men came by the late train." "All Labor members?" asked Alicia, with a laugh. Mrs. Fotheringham explained, with some tartness, that only one of the three was a Labor member Mr. Barton. Of the other two, one was Edgar Frobisher, the other Mr. McEwart, a Liberal M.P., who had just won a hotly contested bye-election. At the name of Edgar Frobisher, Miss Drake's countenance showed some ani- 50 The Testing of Diana Mallorg mation. She inquired if he had been doing anything madder than usual. Mrs. Fotheringham replied, with- out enthusiasm, that she knew nothing about his recent doings nor about Mr. McEwart, who was said, however, to be of the right stuff. Mr. Barton, on the other hand, " is a great friend of mine and a most remarkable man. Oliver has been very lucky to get him. ' ' Alicia inquired whether he was likely to appear in dress clothes. " Certainly not. He never does anything out of keep- ing with his class and he knows that we lay no stress on that kind of thing." This, with another glance at the elegant Paris frock which adorned the person of Alicia a frock, in Mrs. Fotheringham's opinion, far too expensive for the girl's circumstances. Alicia received the glance without flinching. It was one of her good points that she was never meek with the people who disliked her. She. merely threw out another inquiry as to " Miss Vincent." " One of mamma's acquaintances. She was a private secretary to some one mamma knows, and she is going to do some work for Oliver when the session begins. "Didn't Oliver tell me she is a Socialist?" Mrs. Fotheringham believed it might be said. "How Miss Mallory will enjoy herself!" said Alicia, with a little laugh. "Have you been talking to Oliver about her?" Mrs. Fotheringham stared rather hard at her cousin. "Of course. Oliver likes her." "Oliver likes a good many people." " Oh no, Cousin Isabel ! Oliver likes very few people- very, very few," said Miss Drake, decidedly, looking down into the fire. The Testing of Diana Mallorg " I don't know why you give Oliver such an un- amiable character! In my opinion, he is often not so much on his guard as I should like to see him." "Oh, well, we can't all be as critical as you, dear Cousin Isabel! But, anyway, Oliver admires Miss Mai- lory extremely. We can all see that." The girl turned a steady face on her companion. Mrs. Fotheringham was conscious of a certain secret admira- tion. But her own point of view had nothing to do with Miss Drake's. " It amuses him to talk to her," she said, sharply; " I am sure I hope it won't come to anything more. It would be very unsuitable." " Why ? Politics ? Oh ! that doesn't matter a bit. ' ' " I beg your pardon. Oliver is becoming an important man, and it will never do for him to hamper himself with a wife who cannot sympathize with any of his enthu- siasms and ideals." Miss Drake shrugged her shoulders. "He would convert her and he likes triumphing. Oh! Cousin Isabel! look at that lamp!" An oil lamp in an inner drawing-room, placed to illuminate an easel portrait of Lady Lucy, was smoking atrociously. The two ladies flew toward it, and were soon lost to sight and hearing amid a labyrinth of furni- ture and palms. The place they left vacant was almost immediately filled by Oliver Marsham himself, who came in studying a pencilled paper, containing the names of the guests. He and his mother had not found the dinner very easy to arrange. Upon his heels followed Mr. Ferrier, who hurried to the fire, rubbing his hands and complaining of the cold. 52 The Testing of Diana Mallorg " I never felt this house cold before. Has anything happened to your caloriferef These rooms are too big! By-the-way, Oliver" Mr. Ferrier turned his back to the blaze, and looked round him " when are you going to reform this one?" Oliver surveyed it. " Of course I should like nothing better than to make a bonfire of it all! But mother " "Of course of course! Ah, well, perhaps when you marry, my dear boy ! Another reason for making haste !" The older man turned a laughing eye on his com- panion. Marsham merely smiled, a little vaguely, with- out reply. Ferrier observed him, then began abstractedly to study the carpet. After a moment he looked up " I like your little friend, Oliver I like her par* ticularly!" "Miss Mallory? Yes, I saw you had been making acquaintance. Well?" His voice affected a light indifference, but hardly suc- ceeded. "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. She came in slowly, her brow slightly knit, and her black eyes touched with the intent seeking look which was natural to them. Her dress of the freshest simplest white fell about her in plain folds. It made the same young impression as the childish curls on the brow and temples, and both men watched her with delight. Marsham went to meet her. S3 The Testing of Diana Mallorg "Will you sit on my left? I must take in Lady Niton." Diana smiled and nodded. " And who is to be my fate ?" 41 Mr. Edgar Frobisher. You will quarrel with him and like him!" " One of the ' Socialists' ?" 41 Ah you must find out!" He threw her a laughing backward glance as he went off to give directions to some of his other guests. The room filled up. Diana was aware of a tall young man, fair-haired, and evidently Scotch, whom she had not seen before, and then of a girl, whose appearance and dress riveted her attention. She was thin and small hand- some, but for a certain strained emaciated air, a lack of complexion and of bloom. But her blue eyes, black- lashed and black-browed, were superb ; they made indeed the note, the distinction of the whole figure. The thick hair, cut short in the neck, was brushed back and held by a blue ribbon, the only trace of ornament in a singular costume, which consisted of a very simple morning dress, of some woollen material, nearly black, garnished at the throat and wrists by some plain white frills. The dress hung loosely on the girl's starved frame, the hands were long and thin, the face sallow. Yet such was the force of the eyes, the energy of the strong chin and mouth, the flashing freedom of her smile, as she stood talking to Lady Lucy, that all the ugly plainness of the dress seemed to Diana, as she watched her, merely to increase her strange effectiveness, to mark her out the more favorably from the glittering room, from Lady Lucy's satin and dia- monds, or the shimmering elegance of Alicia Drake. As she bowed to Mr. Frobisher, and took his arm amid 54 The Testing of Diana Mallorg the pairs moving toward the dining-room, Diana asked him eagerly who the lady in the dark dress might be. "Oh! a great friend of mine," he said, pleasantly. "Isn't she splendid? Did you notice her evening dress?" "Is it an evening dress?" " It's her evening dress. She possesses two costumes both made of the same stuff, only the morning one has a straight collar, and the evening one has frills." " She doesn't think it right to dress like other peo- ple?" " "Well she has very little money, and what she has she can't afford to spend on dress. No I suppose she doesn't think it right.'* By this time they were settled at table, and Diana, convinced that she had found one of the two Socialists promised her, looked round for the other. Ah! there he was, beside Mrs. Fotheringham who was talking to him with an eagerness rarely vouchsafed to her acquaint- ances. A powerful, short-necked man, in the black Sunday coat of the workman, with sandy hair, blunt features, and a furrowed brow he had none of the magnetism, the strange refinement of the lady in the frills. Diana drew a long breath. " How odd it all is!" she said, as though to herself. Her companion looked at her with amusement. "What is odd? The combination of this house with Barton and Miss Vincent?" "Why do they consent to come here?" she asked, wondering. " I suppose they despise the rich." "Not at all! The poor things the rich can't help themselves just yet. We come here because we mean to use the rich." 55 The Testing of Diana Mallory "You! you too?" "A Fabian " he said, smiling. "Which means that I am not in such a hurry as Barton." "To ruin your country? You would only murder her by degrees ?" flashed Diana. "Ah! you throw down the glove? so soon? Shall we postpone it for a course or two? I am no use till I have fed." Diana laughed. They fell into a gossip about their neighbors. The plain young man, with a shock of fair hair, a merry eye, a short chin, and the spirits of a school-boy, sitting on Lady Niton's left, was, it seemed, the particular pet and prote'ge' of that masterful old lady. Diana remembered to have seen him at tea-time in Miss Drake's train. Lady Niton, she was told, disliked her own sons, but was never tired of befriending two or three young men who took her fancy. Bobbie Forbes was a constant frequenter of her house on Campden Hill. "But he is no toady. He tells her a number of plain truths and amuses her guests. In return she provides him with what she calls ' the best society ' and pushes his interests in season and out of season. He is in the Foreign Office, and she is at present manoeuvring to get him attached to the Special Mission which is going out to Constantinople." Diana glanced across the table, and in doing so met the eyes of Mr. Bobbie Forbes, which laughed into hers involuntarily as much as to say " You see my plight? ridiculous, isn't it?" For Lady Niton was keeping a greedy conversational hold on both Marsham and the young man, pouncing to right or left, as either showed a disposition to escape from it so that Forbes was violently withheld from 56 The Testing of Diana Mallorg Alicia Drake, his rightful lady, and Marsham could engage in no consecutive conversation with Diana. "No escape for you!" smiled Mr. Frobisher, presently, observing the position. " Lady Niton always devastates a dinner-party." Diana protested that she was quite content. Might she assume, after the fourth course, that his hunger was at least scotched and conversation thrown open? " I am fortified thank you. Shall we go back to where we left off ? You had just accused me of ruining the country?" "By easy stages," said Diana. "Wasn't that where we had come to ? But first tell me, because it's all so puzzling! do you and Mr. Marsham agree?" " A good deal. But he thinks he can use us which is his mistake." "And Mr. Ferrier?" Mr. Frobisher shook his head good-humoredly. "No, no! Ferrier is a Whig the Whig of to-day, bien entendu, who is a very different person from the Whig of yesterday still, a Whig, an individualist, a moderate man. He leads the Liberal party and it is changing all the time under his hand into something he dreads and detests. The party can't do without him now but" He paused, smiling. " It will shed him some day?" "It must!" "And where will Mr. Marsham be then?" " On the winning side I think." The tone was innocent and careless; but the words offended her. She drew herself up a little. 5 57 The Testing of Diana Mallory " He would never betray his friends!" " Certainly not," said Mr. Frobisher, hastily; " I didn't mean that. But Marsham has a mind more open, more elastic, more modern than Ferrier great man as he is." Diana was silent. She seemed still to hear some of the phrases and inflections of Mr. Ferrier's talk of the afternoon. Mr. Frobisher' s prophecy wounded some new-born sympathy in her. She turned the conversa- tion. With Oliver Marsham she talked when she could, as Lady Niton allowed her. She succeeded, at least, in learning something more of her right-hand neighbor and of Miss Vincent. Mr. Frobisher, it appeared, was a Fellow of Magdalen, and was at present lodging in Lime- house, near the docks, studying poverty and Trade- unionism, and living upon a pound a week. As for Miss Vincent, in her capacity of secretary to a well-known Radical member of Parliament, she had been employed, for his benefit, in gathering information first-hand, very often in the same fields where Mr. Frobisher was at work. This brought them often together and they were the best of comrades, and allies. Diana's eyes betrayed her curiosity; she seemed to be asking for clews in a strange world. Marsham ap- parently felt that nothing could be more agreeable than to guide her. He began to describe for her the life of such a woman of the people as Marion Vincent. An orphan at fourteen, earning her own living from the first; self- dependent, self-protected; the friend, on perfectly equal terms, of a group of able men, interested in the same social ideals as herself; living alone, in contempt of all 58 The Testing of Diana Mallorg ordinary conventions, now in Kensington or Belgravia, and now in a back street of Stepney, or Poplar, and equally at home and her own mistress in both ; exacting from a rich employer the full market value of the services she rendered him, and refusing to accept the smallest gift or favor beyond ; a convinced Socialist and champion of the poor, who had within the past twelve months, to Marsham's knowledge, refused an offer of marriage from a man of large income, passionately devoted to her, whom she liked mainly, it was believed, because his wealth was based on sweated labor: such was the character sketched by Marsham for his neighbor in the intermittent conversation, which was all that Lady Niton allowed him. Diana listened silently, but inwardly her mind was full of critical reactions. Was this what Mr. Marsham most admired, his ideal of what a woman should be? Was he exalting, exaggerating it a little, by way of an- tithesis to those old-fashioned surroundings, that unreal atmosphere, as he would call it, in which, for instance, he had found her Diana at Rapallo under her father's influence and bringing up ? The notion spurred her pride as well as her loyalty to her father. She began to hold herself rather stiffly, to throw in a critical remark or two, to be a little flippant even, at Miss Vincent's expense. Homage so warm laid at the feet of one ideal was she felt it a disparagement of others; she stood for those others; and presently Marsham began to realize a hurt- ling of shafts in the air, an incipient battle between them. He accepted it with delight. Still the same poetical, combative, impulsive creature, with the deep soft voice! She pleased his senses; she stirred his mind; and he 59 The Testing of Diana Mallorg would have thrown himself into one of the old Rapallo arguments with her then and there but for the gad-fly at his elbow. Immediately after dinner Lady Niton possessed her- self of Diana. "Come here, please, Miss Mallory! I wish to make your acquaintance." Thus commanded, the laughing but rebellious Diana allowed herself to be led to a corner of the over-illuminated drawing-room. "Well!" said Lady Niton, observing her "so you have come to settle in these parts?" Diana assented. "What made you choose Brookshire?" The question was enforced by a pair of needle-sharp eyes. " There isn't a person worth talking to within a radius of twenty miles." Diana declined to agree with her; whereupon Lady Niton impatiently exclaimed : " Tut tut! One might as well milk he-goats as talk to the people here. Nothing to be got out of any of them. Do you like conversa- tion?" " Immensely!" "Hum! But mind you don't talk too much. Oliver talks a great deal more than is good for him. So you met Oliver in Italy? What do you think of him?" Diana, keeping a grip on laughter, said something civil. "Oh, Oliver's clever enough and ambitious!" Lady Niton threw up her hands. "But I'll tell you what stands in his way. He says too sharp things of people. Do you notice that?" " He is very critical," said Diana, evasively. "Oh, Lord, much worse than that!" said Lady Niton, 60 The Testing of Diana Mallorg coolly. " He makes himself very unpopular. You should tell him so." "That would be hardly my place," said Diana, flush- ing a little. Lady Niton stared at her a moment rather hard then said : " But he's honey and balm itself compared to Isabel! The Marshams are old friends of mine, but I don't pretend to like Isabel Fotheringham at all. She calls herself a Radical, and there's no one insists more upon their birth and their advantages than she. Don't let her bully you come to me if she does I'll protect you." Diana said vaguely that Mrs. Fotheringham had been very kind. " You haven't had time to find out," said Lady N ; ton, grimly. She leaned back fanning herself, her queer white face and small black eyes alive with malice. " Did you ever see such a crew as we were at dinner ? I reminded Oliver of the rhyme ' The animals went in two by two.' It's always the way here. There's no society in this house, because you can't take anything or any one for granted. One must always begin from the beginning. What can I have in common with that man Barton? The last time I talked to him, he thought Lord Grey the Reform Bill Lord Grey was a Tory and had never heard of Louis Philippe. He knows nothing that we know and what do I care about his Socialist stuff? Well, now Alicia " her tone changed " do you admire Alicia?" Diana, in discomfort, glanced through the archway, leading to the inner drawing-room, which framed the sparkling figure of Miss Drake and murmured a com- plimentary remark. 61 The Testing of Diana Mal.lorg "No!" said Lady Niton, with emphasis; "no she's not handsome though she makes people believe she is. You'll see in five years. Of course the stupid men admire her, and she plays her cards very cleverly; but my dear!" suddenly the formidable old woman bent forward, and tapped Diana's arm with her fan " let me give you a word of advice. Don't be too innocent here or too amiable. Don't give yourself away especially to Alicia!" Diana had the disagreeable feeling of being looked through and through, physically and mentally; though at the same time she was only very vaguely conscious as to what there might be either for Lady Niton or Miss Drake to see. "Thank you very much," she said, trying to laugh it off. "It is very kind of you to warn me but really I don't think you need." She looked round her waver- ingly. " May I introduce you to my friend ? Mrs. Colwood Lady Niton." For her glance of appeal had brought Mrs. Colwood to her aid, and between them they coped with this enfant terrible among dowagers till the gentlemen came in. " Here is Sir James Childe," said Lady Niton, rising. " He wants to talk to you, and he don't like me. So I'll go." Sir James, not without a sly smile, discharged arrow- like at the retreating enemy, took the seat she had vacated. "This is your first visit to Tallyn, Miss Mallory?" The voice speaking was the voix d'or familiar to Englishmen in many a famous case, capable of any note, any inflection, to which sarcasm or wrath, shrewdness or 62 The Testing of Diana Mallory pathos, might desire to tune it. In this case it was gentleness itself; and so was the countenance he turned upon Diana. Yet it was a countenance built rather for the sterner than the milder uses of life. A natural majesty expressed itself in the domed forehead, and in the fine head, lightly touched with gray; the eyes too were gray, the lips prominent and sensitive, the face long, and, in line, finely regular. A face of feeling and of power; the face of a Celt, disciplined by the stress and conflict of a non-Celtic world. Diana's young sym- pathies sprang to meet it, and they were soon in easy conversation. Sir James questioned her kindly, but discreetly. This was really her first visit to Brookshire? "To England!" said Diana; and then, on a little woo- ing, came out the girl's first impressions, natural, enthu- siastic, gay. Sir James listened, with eyes half-closed, following every movement of her lips, every gesture of head and hand. "Your parents took you abroad quite as a child?" " I went with my father. My mother died when I was quite small." Sir James did not speak for a moment. At last he said: "But before you went abroad, you lived in London?" "Yes in Kensington Square." Sir James made a sudden movement which displaced a book on a little table beside him. He stooped to pick it up. "And your father was tired of England?" Diana hesitated " I I think he had gone through great trouble. He never got over mamma's death." 63 The Testing of Diana Mallorg "Oh yes, I see," said Sir James, gently. Then, in another tone : " So you settled on that beautiful -coast? I wonder if that was the winter I first saw Italy?" He named the year. "Yes that was the year," said Diana. "Had you never seen Italy before that?" She looked at him in a little surprise. "Do I seem to you so old?" said Sir James, smiling. " I had been a very busy man, Miss Mallory, and my holidays had been generally spent in Ireland. But that year 1 ' he paused a moment " that year I had been ill, and the doctors sent me abroad in October," he added, slowly and precisely. " I went first to Paris, and I was at Genoa in November." " We must have been there just about then ! Mamma died in October. And I remember the winter was just beginning at Genoa it was very cold and I got bron- chitis I was only a little thing." " And Oliver tells me you found a home at Portofino ?" Diana replied. He kept her talking ; yet her impression was that he did not listen very much to what she said. At the same time she felt herself studied, in a way which made her self-conscious, which perhaps she might have resented in any man less polished and less courteous. " Pardon me ' he said, abruptly, at a pause in the conversation. " Your name interests me particularly. It is Welsh, is it not? I knew two or three persons of that name; and they were Welsh." Diana's look changed a little. "Yes, it is Welsh," she said, in a hesitating, reserved voice; and then looked round her as though in search of a change of topic. 64 The Testing of Diana Mallorg Sir James bent forward. " May I come and see you some day at Beechcote ?" Diana flushed with surprise and pleasure. " Oh! I should be so honored!" "The honor would be mine," he said, with pleasant deference. " Now I think I see that Marsham is wroth with me for monopolizing you like this." He rose and walked away, just as Marsham brought up Mr. Barton to introduce him to Diana. Sir James wandered on into a small drawing-room at the end of the long suite of rooms; in its seclusion he turned back to look at the group he had left behind. His face, always delicately pale, had grown strained and white. " Is it possible" he said to himself " that she knows nothing? that that man was able to keep it all from her?" He walked up and down a little by himself ponder- ing the prey of the same emotion as had seized him in the afternoon; till at last his ear was caught by some hubbub, some agitation in the big drawing-room, espe- cially by the sound of the girlish voice he had just been listening to, only speaking this time in quite another key. He returned to see what was the matter. He found Miss Mallory the centre of a circle of spec- tators and listeners, engaged apparently in a three- cornered and very hot discussion with Mr. Barton, the Socialist member, and Oliver Marsham. Diana had en- tirely forgotten herself, her shyness, the strange house, and all her alarms. If Lady Niton took nothing for granted at Tallyn, that was not, it seemed, the case with John Barton. He, on the contrary, took it for granted 65 The Testing of Diana Mallorg that everybody there was at least a good Radical, and as stoutly opposed as himself to the " wild-cat " and " Jingo" policy of the Government on the Indian frontier, where one of our perennial little wars was then proceeding. News had arrived that afternoon of an indecisive engage- ment, in which the lives of three English officers and some fifty men of a Sikh regiment had been lost. Mr. Barton, in taking up the evening paper, lying beside Diana, which contained the news, had made very much the remark foretold by Captain Roughsedge in the after- noon. It was, he thought, a pity the repulse had not been more decisive so as to show all the world into what a hornet's nest the Government was going " and a hornet's nest which will cost us half a million to take before we've done." Diana's cheeks flamed. Did Mr. Barton mean to regret that no more English lives had been lost ? Mr. Barton was of opinion that if the defeat had been a bit worse, bloodshed might have been saved in the end. A Jingo Viceroy and a Jingo press could only be stopped by disaster On the contrary, said Diana, we could not afford to be stopped by disaster. Disaster must be retrieved. Mr. Barton asked her why? Were we never to admit that we were in the wrong? The Viceroy and his advisers, she declared, were not likely to be wrong. And prestige had to be maintained. At the word "prestige" the rugged face of the Labor member grew contemptuous and a little angry. He dealt with it as he was accustomed to deal with it in Socialist meetings or in Parliament. His touch in doing so was neither light nor conciliatory; the young lady, he thought, required plain speaking. 66 The Testing of Diana Mallory But so far from intimidating the young lady, he found in the course of a few more thrusts and parries that he had roused a by no means despicable antagonist. Diana was a mere mouth-piece ; but she was the mouth-piece of eye-witnesses; whereas Barton was the mouth-piece of his daily newspaper and a handful of partisan books written to please the political section to which he be- longed. He began to stumble and to make mistakes gross elementary mistakes in geography and fact and there- with to lose his temper. Diana was upon him in a moment very cool and graceful controlling herself well; and it is probable that she would have won the day triumphantly but for the sudden intervention of her host. Oliver Marsham had been watching her with mingled amusement and admiration. The slender figure held defiantly erect, the hands close-locked on the knee, the curly head with the air of a Nike" he could almost see the palm branch in the hand, the white dress and the silky hair, blown back by the blasts of victory! appealed to a rhetorical element in his nature always closely com- bined both with his feelings and his ambitions. Head- long energy and partisanship he was enchanted to find how beautiful they could be, and he threw himself into the discussion simply at first that he might prolong an emotion, might keep the red burning on her lip and cheek. That blundering fellow Barton should not have it all to himself! But he was no sooner well in it than he too began to flounder. He rode off upon an inaccurate telegram in a morning paper; Diana fell upon it at once, tripped it up, exposed it, drove it from the field, while Mr. Ferrier 67 The Testing of Diana Mallorg approved her from the background with a smiling eye and a quietly applauding hand. Then Marsham quoted a speech in the Indian Council. Diana dismissed it with contempt, as the shaft of a frondeur discredited by both parties. He fell back on Blue Books, and other ponderosities Barton by this time silent, or playing a clumsy chorus. But if Diana was not acquainted with these things in the ore, so to speak, she was more than a little acquainted with the missiles that could be forged from them. That very afternoon Hugh Roughsedge had pointed her to some of the best. She took them up a little wildly now for her coolness was departing and for a time Marsham could hardly keep his footing. A good many listeners were by now gathered round the disputants. Lady Niton, wielding some noisy knit- ting needles by the fireside, was enjoying the fray all the more that it seemed to be telling against Oliver. Mrs. Fotheringham, on the other hand, who came up occasionally to the circle, listened and went away again, was clearly seething with suppressed wrath, and had to be restrained once or twice by her brother from inter- fering, in a tone which would at once have put an end to a duel he himself only wished to prolong. Mr. Ferrier perceived her annoyance, and smiled over it. In spite of his long friendship with the family, Isabel Fotheringham was no favorite with the great man. She had long seemed to him a type a strange and modern type of the feminine fanatic who allows political differ- ence to interfere not only with private friendship but with the nearest and most sacred ties; and his philos- opher's soul revolted. Let a woman talk politics, if she must, like this eager idealist girl not with the venom 68 The Testing of Diana Mallorg and gall of the half-educated politician. "As if we hadn't enough of that already!" Other spectators paid more frivolous visits to the scene. Bobbie Forbes and Alicia Drake, attracted by the sounds of war, looked in from the next room. Forbes listened a moment, shrugged his shoulders, made a whistling mouth, and then walked off to a glass book- case the one sign of civilization in the vast room where he was soon absorbed in early editions of English poets, Lady Lucy's inheritance from a literary father. Alicia moved about, a little restless and scornful, now listening unwillingly, and now attempting diversions. But in these she found no one to second her, not even the two pink-and-white nieces of Lady Lucy, who did not understand a word of what was going on, but were none the less gazing open-mouthed at Diana. Marion Vincent meanwhile had drawn nearer to Diana. Her strong significant face wore a quiet smile; there was a friendly, even an admiring penetration in the look with which she watched the young prophetess of Empire and of War. As for Lady Lucy, she was silent, and rather grave. In her secret mind she thought that young girls should not be vehement or presump- tuous. It was a misfortune that this pretty creature had not been more reasonably brought up; a mother's hand had been wanting. While not only Mr. Ferrier and Mrs. Colwood, sitting side by side in the background, but everybody else present, in some measure or degree, was aware of some play of feeling in the scene, beyond and behind the obvious, some hidden forces, or rather, perhaps, some emerging relation, which gave it signifi- cance and thrill. The duel was a duel of brains un- equal at that; what made it fascinating was the universal 69 The Testing of Diana Mallorg or typical element in the clash of the two personalities the man using his whole strength, more and more tyran- nously, more and more stubbornly the girl resisting, flashing, appealing, fighting for dear life, now gaining, now retreating and finally overborne. For Marsham's staying powers, naturally, were the greater. He summoned finally all his nerve and all his knowledge. The air of the carpet-knight with which he had opened battle disappeared; he fought seriously and for victory. And suddenly Diana laughed a little hys- terically and gave in. He had carried her into regions of history and politics where she could not follow. She dropped her head in her hands a moment then fell back in her chair silenced her beautiful passionate eyes fixed on Marsham, as his were on her. "Brava! Brava!" cried Mr. Ferrier, clapping his hands. The room joined in laughter and applause. A few minutes later the ladies streamed out into the hall on their way to bed. Marsham came to light a candle for Diana. "Do you forgive me?" he said, as he gave it to her. The tone was gay and apologetic. She laughed unsteadily, without reply. " When will you take your revenge ?" She shook her head, touched his hand for "good- night," and went up-stairs. As Diana reached her room she drew Mrs. Colwood in with her but not, it seemed, for purposes of conversa- tion. She stood absently by the fire taking off her bracelets and necklace. Mrs. Colwood made a few remarks about the evening and the guests, with little response, and presently wondered why she was detained. 70 The Testing of Diana Mallorg At last Diana put up her hands, and smoothed back the hair from her temples with a long sigh. Then she laid a sudden grasp upon Mrs. Colwood, and looked earnestly and imploringly into her face. " Will you please call me Diana ? And and will you kiss me ?" She humbly stooped her head. Mrs. Colwood, much touched, threw her arms around her, and kissed her heartily. Then a few warm words fell from her as to the scene of the evening. Diana withdrew herself at once, shivering a little. " Oh, I want papa!" she said " I want him so much!" And she hid her eyes against the mantel-piece. Mrs. Colwood soothed her affectionately, perhaps ex- pecting some outburst of confidence, which, however, did not come. Diana said a quiet "good-night," and they parted. But it was long before Mrs. Colwood could sleep. Was the emotion she had just witnessed flinging itself geyserlike into sight, only to sink back as swiftly out of ken was it an effect of the past or an omen of the future? The longing expressed in the girl's heart and voice, after the brave show she had made had it over- powered her just because she felt herself alone, without natural protectors, on the brink of her woman's des- tiny ? CHAPTER IV THE next day, when Diana looked out from her window, she saw a large and dreary park wrapped in scudding rain which promised evil things for the shoot- ing - party of the day. Mr. Marsham senior had ap- parently laid out his park and grounds on the same principles as those on which he had built his house. Everything was large and expensive. The woods and plantations were kept to a nicety; not a twig was out of place. Enormous cost had been incurred in the plant- ing of rare evergreens ; full-grown trees had been trans- planted wholesale from a distance, and still wore in many cases a sickly and invalided air ; and elaborate contrasts in dark and light foliage had been arranged by the land- scape - gardener employed. Dark plantations had a light border light plantatons a dark one. A lake or large pond, with concrete banks and two artificial islands, held the centre of the park, and on the monotonous stretches of immaculate grass there were deer to be seen wherever anybody could reasonably expect them. Diana surveyed it all with a lively dislike. She pitied Lady Lucy and Mr. Marsham because they must live in such a place. Especially, surely, must it be hampering and disconcerting to a man, preaching the democratic gospel, and looking forward to the democratic millen- nium, to be burdened with a house and estate which could offer so few excuses for the wealth of which they 72 The Testing of Diana Mallorg made an arrogant and uninviting display. Immense possessions and lavish expenditure may be, as we all know, so softened by antiquity, or so masked by taste, as not to jar with ideals the most different or remote. But here "proputty! proputty!" was the cry of every ugly wood and tasteless shrubbery, whereas the prospective owner of them, according to his public utterances and career, was magnificently careless of property was, in fact, in the eyes of the lovers of property, its enemy. The house again spoke loudly and aggressively of money ; yet it was the home of a champion of the poor. Well a man cannot help it, if his father has suffered from stupidity and bad taste ; and encumbrances of this kind are more easily created than got rid of. No doubt Oliver Marsham's democratic opinions had been partly bred in him by opposition and recoil. Diana seemed to get a good deal of rather comforting light on the problem by looking at it from this point of view. Indeed, she thought over it persistently while she dressed. From the normal seven-hours' sleep of youth she had awakened with braced nerves. To remember her duel of the night before was no longer to thrill with an excitement inexplicable even to herself, and strangely mingled with a sense of loneliness or foreboding. Under the morning light she looked at things more sanely. Her natural vanity, which was the reflection of her wish to please, told her that she had not done badly. She felt a childish pleasure in the memory of Mr. Barton's dis- comfiture; and as to Mr. Marsham, it was she, and not her beliefs, not the great Imperial "cause" which had been beaten. How could she expect to hold her own with the professional politician when it came really to business? In her heart of hearts she knew that she 6 73 The Testing of Diana Mallorg would have despised Oliver Marsham if he had not been able to best her in argument. "If it had been papa," she thought, proudly, "that would have been another story!" Nevertheless, as she sat meekly under the hands of her maid, smiles "went out and in," as she remembered the points where she had pressed him hard, had almost overcome him. An inclination to measure herself with him again danced within her. Will against will, mind against mind her temperament, in its morning rally, delighted in the thought. And all the time there hovered before her the living man, with his agreeable, energetic, challenging presence. How much better she had liked him, even in his victory of the evening, than in the carping sarcastic mood of the afternoon ! In spite of gayety and expectation, however, she felt her courage fail her a little as she left her room and ventured out into the big populous house. Her solitary bringing- up had made her liable to fits of shyness amid her general expansiveness, and it was a relief to meet no one least of all, Alicia Drake on her way down-stairs. Mrs. Col- wood, indeed, was waiting for her at the end of the pas- sage, and Diana held her hand a little as they descended. A male voice was speaking in the hall Mr. Marsham giving the last directions for the day to the head keeper. The voice was sharp and peremptory too peremptory, one might have thought, for democracy addressing a brother. But the keeper, a gray-haired, weather-beaten man of fifty, bowed himself out respectfully, and Mar- sham turned to greet Diana. Mrs. Colwood saw the kindling of his eyes as they fell on the girl's morning freshness. No sharpness in the voice now! he was all eagerness to escort and serve his guests. 74 The Testing of Diana Mallorg He led them to the breakfast-room, which seemed to be in an uproar, caused apparently by Bobbie Forbes and Lady Niton, who were talking at each other across the table. "What is the matter?" asked Diana, as she slipped into a place to which Sir James Chide smilingly invited her between himself and Mr. Bobbie. Sir James, making a pretence of shutting his ears against the din, replied that he believed Mr. Forbes was protesting against the tyranny of Lady Niton in obliging him to go to church. " She never enters a place of worship herself, but she insists that her young men friends shall go. Mr. Bobbie is putting his foot down!" ; -^ r " Miss Mallory, let me get you some fish," said Forbes, turning to her with a flushed and determined counte- nance. " I have now vindicated the rights of man, and am ready to attend if you will allow me to the wants of woman. Fish? or bacon?" Diana made her choice, and the young man supplied her; then bristling with victory, and surrounded by samples of whatever food the breakfast-table afforded, he sat down to his own meal. "No!" he said, with energy, addressing Diana. "One must really draw the line. The last Sunday Lady Niton took me to church, the service lasted an hour and three-quarters. I am a High Churchman I vow I am an out-and-outer. I go in for snippets and shortening things. The man here is a dreadful old Erastian piles on everything you can pile on so I just felt it necessary to give Lady Niton notice. To-morrow I have work for the department at home! Take my advice, Miss Mallory don't go." "I'm not staying over Sunday," smiled Diana. 75 The Testing of Diana Mallory The young man expressed his regret. "I say," he said, with a quick look round, " you didn't think I was rude last night, did you?" "Rude? When?" "In not listening. I can't listen when people talk politics. I want to drown myself. Now, if it was poetry or something reasonable. You know the only things worth looking at in this beastly house" he lowered his voice " are the books in that glass bookcase. It was Lady Lucy's father old Lord Merston collect- ed them. Lady Lucy never looks at them. Marsham does, I suppose sometimes. Do you know Marsham well ?" " I made acquaintance with him and Lady Lucy on the Riviera." Mr. Bobbie observed her with a shrewd eye. In spite of his inattention of the night before, the interest of Miss Mallory's appearance upon the scene at Tallyn had not been lost upon him, any more than upon other people. The rumor had preceded her arrival that Marsham had been very much " smitten " with her amid the pine woods of Portofino. Marsham's taste was good emphatically good. At the same time it was clear that the lady was no mere facile and commonplace girl. It was Forbes's opinion, based on the scene of the previous evening, that there might be a good deal of wooing to be done. "There are so many things I wanted to show you and to talk about!" said Oliver Marsham, confidentially, to Diana, in the hall after breakfast "but this horrid shoot will take up all the day! If the weather is not too bad, I think some of the ladies meant to join us at luncheon. Will you venture?" 76 The Testing of Diana Mallory His tone was earnest; his eyes indorsed it. Diana hoped it might be possible to come. Marsham lingered beside her to the last minute; but presently final orders had to be given to keepers, and country neighbors began to arrive. "They do the thing here on an enormous scale," said Bobbie Forbes, lounging and smoking beside Diana; " it's almost the biggest shoot in the county. Amusing, isn't it? in this Radical house. Do you see that man Mc- Ewart?" Diana turned her attention upon the young member of Parliament who had arrived the night before plain, sandy-haired, with a long flat-backed head, and a gentle- manly manner. " I suspect a good deal's going on here behind the scenes," said Bobbie, dropping his voice. "That man Barton may be a fool to talk, but he's a great power in the House with the other Labor men. And McEwart has been hand and glove with Marsham all this Session. They're trying to force Ferrier's hand. Some Bill the Labor men want and Ferrier won't hear of. A good many people say we shall see Marsham at the head of a Fourth Party of his own very soon. Se soumettre, ou se demettre! well, it may come to that for old Ferrier. But I'll back him to fight his way through." "How can Mr. Marsham oppose him?" asked Diana, in wonder, and some indignation with her companion. " He is the Leader of the party, and besides they are such friends!" Forbes looked rather amused at her womanish view of things. "Friends? I should rather think so!" By this time he and Diana were strolling up and down the winter garden opening out of the hall, which was now 77 The Testing of Diana Mallory full of a merry crowd waiting for the departure of the shooters. Suddenly Forbes paused. "Do you see that?" Diana's eyes followed his till they perceived Lady Lucy sitting a little way off under a camellia-tree covered with red blossom. Her lap was heaped with the letters ( of the morning. Mr. Ferrier, with a cigarette in his mouth, stood beside her, reading the sheets of a letter which she handed to him as she herself finished them. Every now and then she spoke to him, and he replied. In the little scene, between the slender white-haired woman and the middle-aged man, there was something so intimate, so conjugal even, that Diana involuntarily turned away as though to watch it were an impertinence. "Rather touching, isn't it?" said the youth, smiling benevolently. "Of course you know there's a ro- mance, or rather was long ago. My mother knew all about it. Since old Marsham's death, Lady Lucy's never done a thing without Ferrier to advise her. Why she hasn't married him, that's the puzzle. But she's a curious woman, is Lady Lucy. Looks so soft, but " He pursed up his lips with an important air. "Anyhow, she depends a lot on Ferrier. He's con- stantly here whenever he can be spared from London and Parliament. He got Oliver into Parliament his first seat I mean for Manchester. The Ferriers are very big people up there, and old Ferrier's recommendation of him just put him in straight no trouble about it! Oh! and before that when he was at Eton and Oxford too Ferrier looked after him like a father. Used to have him up for exeats and talk to the Head and keep his mother straight like an old brick, Ferrier's a splendid Chap!" 78 The Testing of Diana Mai lory Diana warmly agreed. "Perhaps you know," pursued the chatterbox, " that this place is all hers Lady Lucy's. She can leave it and her money exactly as she pleases. It is to be hoped she won't leave much of it to Mrs. Fotheringham. Isn't that a woman! Ah! you don't know her yet. Hullo! there's Marsham after me." For Marsham was beckoning from the hall. They returned hurriedly. "Who made Oliver that waistcoat?" said Lady Niton, putting on her spectacles. " I did," said Alicia Drake, as she came up, with her arm round the younger of Lady Niton's nieces. " Isn't it becoming?" "Hum!" said Lady Niton, in a gruff tone, "young ladies can always find new ways of wasting their time." Marsham approached Diana. "We're just off," he said, smiling. "The clouds are lifting. You'll come?" " What, to lunch ?" said Lady Niton, just behind. " Of course they will. What else is there for the women to do? Congratulate you on your waistcoat, Oliver." "Isn't it superb?" he said, drawing himself up with mock majesty, so as to show it off. "I am Alicia's debtor for life." Yet a careful ear might have detected something a little hollow in the tone. Lady Niton looked at him, and then at Miss Drake, evidently restraining her sharp tongue for once, though with difficulty. Marsham lingered a moment making some last arrangements for the day with his sister. Diana noticed that he towered over the men among whom he stood; and she felt herself suddenly delighting 79 The Testing of Diana Mallory in his height, in his voice which was remarkably refined and agreeable, in his whole capable and masterful pres- ence. Bobbie Forbes standing beside him was dwarfed to insignificance, and he seemed to be conscious of it, for he rose on his toes a little, involuntarily copying Marsham's attitude, and looking up at him. As the shooters departed, Forbes bringing up the rear, Lady Niton laid her wrinkled hand on his arm. "Never mind, Bobbie, never mind!" she smiled at him confidentially. "We can't all be six foot." Bobbie stared at her first fiercely then exploded with laughter, shook off her hand and departed. Lady Niton, evidently much pleased with herself, came back to the window where most of the other ladies stood watching the shooters with their line of beaters crossing the lawn toward the park beyond. "Ah!" she said, " I thought Alicia would see the last of them!" For Miss Drake, in defiance of wind and spitting rain, was walking over the lawn the centre of a large group, with Marsham beside her. Her white serge dress and the blue shawl she had thrown over her fair head made a brilliant spot in the dark wavering line. " Alicia is very picturesque," said Mrs. Fotheringham, turning away. "Yes and last summer Oliver seemed to be well aware of it," said Lady Niton, in her ear. "Was he? He has always been very good friends with Alicia." " He could have done without the waistcoat," said Lady Niton, sharply. "Aren't you rather unkind? She began it last sum- mer, and finished it yesterday. Then, of course, she 80 The Testing of Diana Mallorg presented it to him. I don't see why that should ex- pose her to remarks." "One can't help making remarks about Alicia," said Lady Niton, calmly, " and she can defend herself so well." "Poor Alicia!" "Confess you wouldn't like Oliver to marry her." " Oliver never had any thought of it." Lady Niton shook her queer gray head. "Oliver paid her a good deal of attention last sum- mer. Alicia must certainly have considered the matter. And she is a young lady not easily baffled." "Baffled!" Mrs. Fotheringham laughed. "What can she do?" " Well, it's true that Oliver seems to have got another idea in his head. What do you think of that pretty child who came yesterday the Mallory girl?" Mrs. Fotheringham hesitated, then said, coldly : " I don't like discussing these things. Oliver has plenty of time before him." "If he is turning his thoughts in that quarter," persisted Lady Niton, " I give him my blessing. Well bred, handsome, and well off what's your objection?" Mrs. Fotheringham laughed impatiently. " Really, Lady Niton, I made no objection." "You don't like her!" " I have only known her twenty-four hours. How can I have formed any opinion about her?" " No you don't like her! I suppose you thought she talked stuff last night?" " Well, there can be no two opinions about that!" cried Mrs. Fotheringham. " Her father seems to have filled her head with all sorts of false Jingo notions, and I must say I wondered Oliver was so patient with her," 8? The Testing of Diana Mallorg Lady Niton glanced at the thin fanatical face of the speaker. "Oliver had great difficulty in holding his own. She is no fool, and you'll find it out, Isabel, if you try to argue her down "I shouldn't dream of arguing with such a child!" " Well, all I know is Ferrier seemed to admire her per- formance." Mrs. Fotheringham paused a moment, then said, with harsh intensity : "Men have not the same sense of responsibility." "You mean their brains are befogged by a pretty face?" "They don't put non-essentials aside, as we do. A girl like that, in love with what she calls 'glory' and 'prestige,' is a dangerous and demoralizing influence. That glorification of the Army is at the root of half our crimes'" Mrs. Fotheringham's pale skin had flushed till it made one red with her red hair. Lady Niton looked at her with mingled amusement and irritation. She won- dered why men married such women as Isabel Fothering- ham. Certainly Ned Fotheringham himself deceased some three years before this date had paid heavily for his mistake; especially through the endless disputes which had arisen between his children and his second wife partly on questions of religion, partly on this matter of the Army. Mrs. Fotheringham was an agnostic ; her step- sons, the children of a devout mother, were churchmen. Influenced, moreover, by a small coterie, in which, to the dismay of her elderly husband, she had passed most of her early married years, she detested the Army as a brutal influence on the national life. Her youngest 82 The Testing of Diana Mallorg step-son, however, had insisted on becoming a soldier. She broke with him, and with his brothers who supported him. Now a childless widow, without ties and moderate- ly rich, she was free to devote herself to her ideas. In former days she would have been a religious bigot of the first water; the bigotry was still there; only the subjects of it were changed. Lady Niton delighted in attacking her; yet was not without a certain respect for her. Old sceptic that she was, ideals of any sort imposed upon her. How people came by them, she herself could never imagine. On this particular morning, however, Mrs. Fothering- ham did not allow herself as long a wrangle as usual with her old adversary. She went off, carrying an arm- ful of letters with large enclosures, and Lady Niton understood that for the rest of the morning she would be as much absorbed by her correspondence mostly on public questions as the Leader of the Opposition him- self, to whom the library was sacredly given up. "When that woman takes a dislike," she thought to herself, "it sticks! She has taken a dislike to the Mai- lory girl. Well, if Oliver wants her, let him fight for her. I hope she won't drop into his mouth! Mallory! Mai- lory! I wonder where she comes from, and who her people are." Meanwhile Diana was sitting among her letters, which mainly concerned the last details of the Beechcote furnishing. She and Mrs. Colwood were now "Muriel" and " Diana" to each other, and Mrs. Colwood had been admitted to a practical share in Diana's small anxieties. Suddenly Diana, who had just opened a hitherto unread letter, exclaimed : 83 The Testing of Diana Mallory "Oh, but haw delightful!" Mrs. Colwood looked up; Diana's aspect was one of sparkling pleasure and surprise. " One of my Barbadoes' cousins is here in London actually in London and I knew nothing of her coming. She writes to me. Of course she must come to Beech- cote she must come at once!" She sprang up, and went to a writing-table near, to look for a telegraph form. She wrote a message with eagerness, despatched it, and then explained as coherent- ly as her evident emotion and excitement would allow. QThey are my only relations in the world that I know of that papa ever spoke to me about. Mamma's sister married Mr. Merton. He was a planter in Bar- badoes. He died about three years ago, but his widow and daughters have lived on there. They were very poor and couldn't afford to come home. Fanny is the eld- est I think she must be about twenty." Diana paced up and down, with her hands behind her, wondering when her telegram would reach her cousin, who was staying at a London boarding-house, when she might be expected at Beechcote, how long she could be persuaded to stay speculations, in fact, in- numerable. Her agitation was pathetic in Mrs. Col- wood's eyes. It testified to the girl's secret sense of forlornness, to her natural hunger for the ties and re- lationships other girls possessed in such abundance. Mrs. Colwood inquired if it was long since she had had news of her cousins. " Oh, some years!" said Diana, vaguely. " I remember a letter coming before we went to the East and papa reading it. I know" she hesitated " I know he didn't like Mr. Merton." 84 The Testing of Diana Mallory She stood still a moment, thinking. The lights and shadows of reviving memory crossed her face, and presently her thought emerged, with very little hint to her companion of the course it had been taking out of sight. " Papa always thought it a horrid life for them Aunt Merton and the girls especially after they gave up their estate and came to live in the town. But how could they help it? They must have been very poor. Fanny" she took up the letter "Fanny says she has come home to learn music and French that she may earn money by teaching when she goes back. She doesn't write very well, does she?" She held out the sheet. The handwriting, indeed, was remarkably illiterate, and Mrs. Colwood could only say that probably a girl of Miss Merton's circumstances had had few advantages. "But then, you see, we'll give her advantages!" cried Diana, throwing herself down at Mrs. Colwood' s feet, and beginning to plan aloud. "You know if she will only stay with us, we can easily have people down from London for lessons. And she can have the green bed- room over the dining-room can't she ? and the libra- ry to practise in. It would be absurd that she should stay in London, at a horrid boarding-house, when there's Beechcote, wouldn't it?" Mrs. Colwood agreed that Beechcote would probably be quite convenient for Miss Merton's plans. If she felt a little pang at the thought that her pleasant tete-a-tete with her new charge was to be so soon interrupted, and for an indefinite period, by a young lady with the hand- writing of a scullery-maid, she kept it entirely hidden. Diana talked herself into the most rose-colored plans for Fanny Merton's benefit so voluminous, indeed, that 85 The Testing of Diana Mallory Mrs. Colwood had to leave her in the middle of them that she might go up-stairs and mend a rent in her walking-dress. Diana was left alone in the drawing- room, still smiling and dreaming. In her impulsive generosity she saw herself as the earthly providence of her cousin, sharing with a dear kinswoman her own unjustly plentiful well-being. Then she took up the letter again. It ran thus: " MY DEAR DIANA, You mustn't think it cheeky my calling you that, but I am your real cousin, and mother told me to write to you. I hope too you won't be ashamed of us though we are poor. Everybody knows us in Barbadoes, though of course that's not London. I am the eldest of the family, and I got very tired of living all in a pie, and so I've come home to Eng- land to better myself. A year ago I was engaged to be married, but the young man behaved badly. A good riddance, all my friends told me but it wasn't a pleasant experience. Any- way now I want to earn some money, and see the world a little. I have got rather a good voice, and I am considered handsome at least smart-looking. If you are not too grand to invite me to your place, I should like to come and see you, but of course you must do as you please. I got your address from the bank Uncle Mallory used to send us checks on. I can tell you we have missed those checks pretty badly this last year. I hope you have now got over your great sorrow. This boarding- house is horribly poky but cheap, which is the great thing. I arrived the night before last, "And I am " Your affectionate cousin "FANNY MERTON." No, it really was not an attractive letter. On the second reading, Diana pushed it away from her, rather hastily. Then she reminded herself again, elaborately, of the Mertons' disadvantages in life, painting them in imagination as black as possible. And before she had gone far with this process all doubt and distaste were 86 The Testing of Diana Mallorg once more swept away by the rush of yearning, of an interest she could not subdue, in this being of her own flesh and blood, the child of her mother's sister. She sat with flushed cheeks, absorbed in a stream of thoughts and reminiscence. " You look as though you had had good news," said Sir James Chide, as he paused beside her on his way through the drawing-room. He was not a sportsman; nor was Mr. Ferrier. His eyes rested upon her with such a kind interest, his manner showed so plainly yet again that he desired to be her friend, that Diana responded at once. " I have found a cousin!" she said, gayly, and told the story of her expected visitor. Outwardly perfunctorily Sir James's aspect while she was speaking answered to hers. If she was pleased, he was pleased too. He congratulated her; he entered into her schemes for Miss Merton's amusement. Really, all the time, the man's aspect was singularly grave, he listened carefully to every word; he observed the speaker. "The young lady's mother is your aunt?" " She was my mother's sister." " And they have been long in Barbadoes?" " I think they migrated there just about the same time we went abroad after my mother's death." Sir James said little. He encouraged her to talk on; he listened to the phrases of memory or expectation which revealed her history her solitary bringing-up her reserved and scholarly father the singular close- ness, and yet as it seemed strangeness of her relation to him. It appeared, for instance, that it was only an accident, some years before, which had revealed to Diana 87 The Testing of Diana Mallorg the very existence of these cousins. Her father had never spoken of them spontaneously. " I hope she will be everything that is charming and delightful," he said at last as he rose. " And remember I am to come and see you!" He stooped his gray head, and gently touched her hand with an old man's freedom. Diana warmly renewed her invitation. "There is a house near you that I often go to Sir William Felton's. I am to be there in a few weeks. Perhaps I shall even be able to make acquaintance with Miss Fanny!" He walked away from her. Diana could not see the instant change of counte- nance which accompanied the movement. Urbanity, gentleness, kind indulgence vanished. Sir James looked anxious and disturbed; and he seemed to be talking to himself. The rest of the morning passed heavily. Diana wrote some letters, and devoutly hoped the rain would stop. In the intervals of her letter- writing, or her study of the clouds, she tried to make friends with Miss Drake and Mrs. Fotheringham. But neither effort came to good. Alicia, so expansive, so theatrical, so much the centre of the situation, when she chose, could be equally prickly, monosyllabic, and repellent when it suited her to be so. Diana talked timidly of dress, of London, and the Season. They were the subjects on which it seemed most natural to approach Miss Drake; Diana's attitude was inquiring and propitiatory. But Alicia could find none but careless or scanty replies till Madeleine Varley came up. Then Miss Drake's tongue was loosened. To her, as to an equal and intimate, she displayed her expert 88 The Testing of Diana Mallorg knowledge of shops and modistes, of "people" and their stories. Diana sat snubbed and silent, a little provincial outsider, for whom "seasons" are not made. Nor was it any better with Mrs. Fotheringham. At twelve o'clock that lady brought the London papers into the drawing- room. Further information had been received from the Afghan frontier. The English loss in the engagement already reported was greater than had been at first sup- posed; and Diana found the name of an officer she had known in India among the dead. As she pondered the telegram, the tears in her eyes, she heard Mrs. Fothering- ham describe the news as "on the whole very satis- factory." The nation required the lesson. Whereupon Diana's tongue was loosed and would not be quieted. She dwelt hotly on the "sniping," the treacheries, the midnight murders which had preceded the expedition. Mrs. Fotheringham listened to her with flashing looks, and suddenly she broke into a denunciation of war, the military spirit, and the ignorant and unscrupulous per- sons at home, especially women, who aid and abet politicians in violence and iniquity, the passion of which soon struck Diana dumb. Here was no honorable fight of equal minds. She was being punished for her ad- vocacy of the night before, by an older woman of tyrannical temper, toward whom she stood in the re- lation of guest to host. It was in vain to look round for defenders. The only man present was Mr. Barton, who sat listening with ill-concealed smiles to what was going on, without taking part in it. Diana extricated herself with as much dignity as she could muster, but she was too young to take the matter philosophically. She went up-stairs burning with anger, the tears of hurt feeling in her eyes. It seemed to her 7 89 The Testing of Diana Mallorij that Mrs. Fotheringham's attack implied a personal dis- like; Mr. Marsham's sister had been glad to " take it out of her." To this young cherished creature it was almost her first experience of the kind. On the way up-stairs she paused to look wistfully out of a staircase window. Still raining alack ! She thought with longing of the open fields, and the shooters. Was there to be no escape all day from the ugly oppressive house, and some of its inmates? Half shyly, yet with a quickening of the heart, she remembered Marsham's farewell to her of that morning, his look of the night before. Intellectually, she was comparatively mature ; in other respects, as inexperienced and impressionable as any convent girl. "I fear luncheon is impossible!" said Lady Lucy's voice. Diana looked up and saw her descending the stairs. "Such a pity! Oliver will be so disappointed." She paused beside her guest an attractive and dis- tinguished figure. On her white hair she wore a lace cap which was tied very precisely under her delicate chin. Her dress, of black satin, was made in a full plain fashion of her own; she had long since ceased to allow her dressmaker any voice in it; and her still beautiful hands flashed with diamonds, not however in any vulgar profusion. Lady Lucy's mother had been of a Quaker family, and though Quakerism in her had been deeply alloyed with other metals, the moral and intellectual self-dependence of Quakerism, its fastidious reserves and discrimination were very strong in her. Discrimination indeed was the note of her being. For every Christian, some Christian precepts are obsolete. For Lady Lucy that which runs "Judge Not!" had never been alive. 90 The Testing of Diana Mallorg Her emphatic reference to Marsham had brought the ready color to Diana's cheeks. "Yes there seems no chance!" she said, shyly, and regretfully, as the rain beat on the window. "Oh, dear me, yes!" said a voice behind them. "The glass is going up. It '11 be a fine afternoon and we'll go and meet them at Holme Copse. Sha'n't we, Lady Lucy?" Mr. Ferrier appeared, coming up from the library laden with papers. The three stood chatting together on the broad gallery which ran round the hall. The kindness of the two elders was so marked that Diana's spirits returned; she was not to be quite a pariah it seemed! As she walked away toward her room, Mr. Ferrier 's eyes pursued her the slim round figure, the young loveliness of her head and neck. "Well! what are you thinking about her?" he said, eagerly, turning to the mistress of the house. Lady Lucy smiled. " I should prefer it if she didn't talk politics," she said, with the slightest possible stiffness. "But she seems a very charming girl." " She talks politics, my dear lady, because living alone with her father and with her books, she has had nothing else to talk about but politics and books. Would you rather she talked scandal or Monte Carlo?" The Quaker in Lady Lucy laughed. " Of course if she married Oliver, she would subordinate her opinions to his." "Would she!" said Mr. Ferrier " I'm not so sure!" Lady Lucy replied that if not, it would be calamitous. In which she spoke sincerely. For although now the ruler, and, if the truth were known, the somewhat The Testing of Diana Mallorg despotic ruler of Tallyn, in her husband's lifetime she had known very well how to obey. "I have asked various people about the Mallorys," she resumed. " But nobody seems to be able to tell me anything." " I trace her to Sir Thomas of that ilk. Why not ? It is a Welsh name!" " I have no idea who her mother was," said Lady Lucy, musing. " Her father was very refined quite a gentle- man." " She bears, I think, very respectable witness to her mother," laughed Ferrier. "Good stock on both sides; she carries it in her face." "That's all I ask," said Lady Lucy, quietly. "But that you do ask!" Her companion looked at her with an eye half affectionate, half ironic. " Most exclusive of women! I sometimes wish I might unveil your real opinions to the Radical fellows who come here." Lady Lucy colored faintly. "That has nothing to do with politics." " Hasn't it ? I can't imagine anything that has more to do with them." " I was thinking of character honorable tradition not blood." Ferrier shook his head. " Won't do. Barton wouldn't pass you ' A man's a man for a' that' and a woman too." "Then I am a Tory!" said Lady Lucy, with a smile that shot pleasantly through her gray eyes. "At last you confess it!" cried Ferrier, as he carried off his papers. But his gayety soon departed. He stood awhile at the window in his room, looking out upon the sodden park a rather gray and sombre figure. Over his 92 The Testing of Diana Mallory ugly impressiveness a veil of weariness had dropped. Politics and the strife of parties, the devices of enemies and the dissatisfaction of friends his soul was tired of them. And the emergence of this possible love-affair for the moment, ardent and deep as were the man's affections and sympathies, toward this Marsham house- hold, it did but increase his sense of moral fatigue, [if. the flutter in the blood and the long companionship of equal love if these were the only things of real value in life how had his been worth living? "7 CHAPTER V THE last covert had been shot, and as Marsham and his party, followed by scattered groups of beaters, turned homeward over the few fields that separated them from the park, figures appeared coming toward them in the rosy dusk Mr. Ferrier and Diana in front, with most of the other guests of the house in their train. There was a merry fraternization between the two parties a characteristic English scene, in a characteristic setting: the men in their tweed shooting-suits, some with their guns over their shoulders, for the most part young and tall, clean-limbed and clear-eyed, the well-to-do English- man at his most English moment, and brimming with the joy of life ; the girls dressed in the same tweed stuffs, and with the same skilled and expensive simplicity, but wearing, some of them, over their cloth caps, bright veils, white or green or blue, which were tied under their chins, and framed faces aglow with exercise and health. Marsham's eyes flew to Diana, who was in black, with a white veil. Some of the natural curls on her temples, which reminded him of a Vandyck picture, had been a little blown by the wind across her beautiful brow; he liked the touch of wildness that they gave; and he was charmed anew by the contrast between her frank young strength, and the wistful look, so full of relation to all about it, as though seeking to understand and be one with it. He perceived too her childish pleasure in each 94 The Testing of Diana Mallory fresh incident and experience of the English winter, which proved to her anew that she had come home ; and he flattered himself, as he went straight to her side, that his coming had at least no dimming effect on the radi- ance that had been there before. "I believe you are not pining for the Mediterranean!" he said, laughing, as they walked on together. In a smiling silence she drew in a great breath of the frosty air while her eyes ranged along the chalk down, on the western edge of which they were walking, and then over the plain at their feet, the smoke wreaths that hung above the villages, the western sky filled stormily with the purples and grays and crimsons of the sunset, the woods that climbed the down, or ran in a dark rampart along its crest. "No one can ever love it as much as I do!" she said at last " because I have been an exile. That will be my advantage always." "Your compensation perhaps." "Mrs. Colwood puts it that way. Only I don't like having my grievance taken away." " Against whom ?" " Ah! not against papa!" she said, hurriedly " against Fate!" " If you dislike being deprived of a grievance so do I. You have returned me my Rossetti." She laughed merrily. " You made sure I should lose or keep it?" "It is the first book that anybody has returned to me for years. I was quite resigned." "To a damaging estimate of my character? Thank you very much!" "I wonder" he said, in another tone "what sort 95 The Testing of Diana Mallory of estimate you have of my character false, or true?" "Well, there have been a great many surprises!" said Diana, raising her eyebrows. "In the matter of my character?" "Not altogether." " My surroundings ? You mean I talked Radicalism or, as you would call it, Socialism to you at Portofino, and here you find me in the character of a sporting Squire?" "I hear" she said, deliberately looking about her "that this is the finest shoot in the county." " It is. There is no denying it. But, in the first place, it's my mother's shoot, not mine the estate is hers, not mine and she wishes old customs to be kept up. In the next well, of course, the truth is that I like it abomi- nably!" He had thrust his cap into his pocket, and was walk- ing bareheaded. In the glow of the evening air his strong manhood seemed to gain an added force and vitality. He moved beside her, magnified and haloed, as it were, by the dusk and the sunset. Yet his effect upon her was no mere physical effect of good looks and a fine stature. It was rather the effect of a personality which strangely fitted with and evoked her own of that congruity, indeed, from which all else springs. She laughed at his confession. " I hear also that you are the best shot in the neigh- borhood." "Who has been talking to you about me?" he asked, with a slight knitting of the brows. "Mr. Ferrier a little." He gave an impatient sigh, so disproportionate to the 96 The Testing of Diana Mallorg tone of their conversation, that Diana looked at him in sudden surprise. " Haven't you often wondered how it is that the very people who know you best know you least?" The question was impetuously delivered. Diana re- called Mr. Forbes's remarks as to dissensions behind the scenes. She stepped cautiously. "I thought Mr. Ferrier knew everything!" " I wish he knew something about his party and the House of Commons!" cried Marsham, as though a passion within leaped to the surface. The startled eyes beside him beguiled him further. " I didn't mean to say anything indiscreet or dis- loyal," he said, with a smile, recovering himself. " It is often the greatest men who cling to the old world when the new is clamoring. But the new means to be heard all the same." Diana's color flashed. " I would rather be in that old world with Mr. Ferrier than in the new with Mr. Barton!" " What is the use of talking of preferences ? The world is what it is and will be what it will be. Barton is our master Ferrier 's and mine. The. point is to come to terms, and make the best of it." " No! the point is to hold the gate! and die on the threshold, if need be." 'They had come to a stile. Marsham had crossed it, and Diana mounted. Her young form showed sharply against the west; he looked into her eyes, divided between laughter and feeling; she gave him her hand. The man's pulses leaped anew. He was naturally of a cool and self-possessed temperament \the life of the brain much stronger in him than the life of the senses. | But at that 97 The Testing of Diana Mallorg moment he recognized as perhaps, for the first time, the night before that Nature and youth had him at last in grip. At the same time the remembrance of a walk over the same ground that he had taken in the autumn with Alicia Drake flashed, unwelcomed, into his mind. It stirred a half-uneasy, half-laughing compunction. He could not flatter himself yet that his cousin had for- gotten it. "What gate? and what threshold?" he asked Diana, as they moved on. " If you mean the gate of power it is too late. Democracy is in the citadel and has run up its own flag. Or to take another metaphor the Whirlwind is in possession the only question is who shall ride it!" Diana declared that the Socialists would ride it to the abyss with England on the crupper. " Magnificent!" said Marsham, "but merely rhetorical. Besides all that we ask, is that Ferrier should ride it. Let him only try the beast and he will find it tame enough." "And if he won't?" "Ah, if he won't " said Marsham, uncertainly, and paused. In the growing darkness she could no longer see his face plainly. But presently he resumed, more earnestly and simply. "Don't misunderstand me! Ferrier is our chief my chief, above all and one does not even discuss whether one is loyal to him. The party owes him an enormous debt. As for myself He drew a long breath, which was again a sigh. Then with a change of manner, and in a lighter tone: "I seem to have given myself away to an enemy!" "Poor enemy!" 98 THE MAN S PULSES LEAPED ANEW The Testing of Diana Mallory He looked at her, half laughing, half anxious. "Tell me! last night you thought me intolerant overbearing?" "I disliked being beaten," said Diana, candidly; "es- pecially as it was only my ignorance that was beaten not my cause." "Shall we begin again?" Through his gayety, however, a male satisfaction in victory pierced very plainly. Diana winced a little. "No, no! I must go back to Captain Roughsedge first and get some new arguments!" "Roughsedge!" he said, in surprise. "Roughsedge? He never carried an argument through in his life!" Diana defended her new friend to ears unsympathetic. Her defence, indeed, evoked from him a series of the same impatient, sarcastic remarks on the subject of the neigh- bors as had scandalized her the day before. She fired up, and they were soon in the midst of another battle- royal, partly on the merits of particular persons and partly on a more general theme the advantage or dis- advantage of an optimist view of your fellow-creat- ures. Marsham was, before long, hard put to it in argument, and very delicately and discreetly convicted of arrogance or worse. They were entering the woods of the park when he suddenly stopped and said: " Do you know that you have had a jolly good re- venge pressed down and running over?" Diana smiled, and said nothing. She had delighted in the encounter; so, in spite of castigation, had he. There surged up in him a happy excited consciousness of quickened life and hurrying hours. He looked with distaste at the nearness of the house; and at the group 99 The Testing of Diana Mallory of figures which had paused in front of them, waiting for them, on the farther edge of the broad lawn. " You have convicted me of an odious, exclusive, bullying temper or you think you have and all you will allow me in the way of victory is that I got the best of it because Captain Roughsedge wasn't there!" "Not at all. I respect your critical faculty!" " You wish to hear me gush like Mrs. Minchin. It is simply astounding the number of people you like!" Diana's laugh broke into a sigh. " Perhaps it's like a hungry boy in a goody-shop. He wants to eat them all." "Were you so very solitary as a child?" he asked her, gently, in a changed tone, which was itself an act of homage, almost a caress. "Yes I was very solitary," she said, after a pause. " And I am really gregarious dreadfully fond of people ! and curious about them. And I think, oddly enough, papa was too." A question rose naturally to his lips, but was checked unspoken. He well remembered Mr. Mallory at Porto- fino; a pleasant courteous man, evidently by nature a man of the world, interested in affairs and in literature, with all the signs on him of the English governing class. It was certainly curious that he should have spent all those years in exile with his child, in a remote villa on the Italian coast. Health, Marsham supposed, or finance the two chief motives of life. For himself, the thought ' of Diana's childhood between the pine woods and the sea gave him pleasure; it added another to the poetical and romantic ideas which she suggested. There came back on him the plash of the waves beneath the Portofino headland, the murmur of the pines, the fragrance of the 100 The Testing of Diana Mallorg underwood. He felt the kindred between all these, and her maidenly energy, her unspoiled be.auty. "One moment!" he said, as they began to cross the lawn. " Has my sister attacked you yet?" The smile with which the words were spoken could be heard though not seen. Diana laughed, a little awkwardly. " I am afraid Mrs. Fotheringham thinks me a child of blood and thunder! I am so sorry!" " If she presses you too hard, call me in. Isabel and I understand each other." Diana murmured something polite. Mr. Frobisher meanwhile came to meet them with a remark upon the beauty of the evening, and Alicia Drake followed. " I expect you found it a horrid long way," she said to Diana. Diana disclaimed fatigue. " You came so slowly, we thought you must be tired." Something in the drawling manner and the slightly insolent expression made the words sting. Diana hurried on to Marion Vincent's side. That lady was leaning on a stick, and for the first time Diana saw that she was slightly lame. She looked up with a pleasant smile and greeting ; but before they could move on across the ample drive, Mr. Frobisher overtook them. " Won't you take my arm?" he said, in a low voice. Miss Vincent slipped her hand inside his arm, and rested on him. He supported her with what seemed to Diana a tender carefulness, his head bent to hers, while he talked and she replied. Diana followed, her girl's heart kindling. "Surely! surely! they are in love? engaged?" But no one else appeared to take any notice or made any remark. 101 The Testing of Diana Mallory Long did the memory of the evening which followed live warm in the heart of Diana. It was to her an evening of triumph triumph innocent, harmless, and complete. Her charm, her personality had by now captured the whole party, save for an opposition of three and the three realized that they had for the moment no chance of influencing the popular voice. The rugged face of Mr. Barton stiffened as she approached; it seemed to him that the night before he had been snubbed by a chit, and he was not the man to forget it easily. Alicia Drake was a little pale and a little silent during the evening, till, late in its course, she succeeded in carrying off a group of young men who had come for the shoot and were staying the night, and in establishing a noisy court among them. Mrs. Fotheringham disapproved, by now, of al- most everything that concerned Miss Mallory : of her taste in music or in books , of the touch of effusion in her man- ner, which was of course " affected " or " aristocratic " ; of the enthusiasms she did not possess, no less than of those she did. On the sacred subject of the suffrage, for in- stance, which with Mrs. Fotheringham was a matter for propaganda everywhere and at all times, Diana was but a cracked cymbal, when struck she gave back either no sound at all, or a wavering one. Her beautiful eyes were blank or hostile ; she would escape like a fawn from the hunter. As for other politics, no one but Mrs. Foth- eringham dreamed of introducing them. She, however, would have discovered many ways of dragging them in, and of setting down Diana; but here her brother was on the watch, and time after time she found herself checked or warded off. Diana, indeed, was well defended. The more ill-hu- mored Mrs. Fotheringham grew, the more Lady Niton IO2 The Testing of Diana Mallorg enjoyed the evening and her own " Nitonisms. " It was she who after dinner suggested the clearing of the hall .and an impromptu dance on the ground that "girls must waltz for their living." And when Diana proved to be one of those in whom dancing is a natural and shining gift, so that even the gilded youths of the party, who were perhaps inclined to fight shy of Miss Mallory as "a girl who talked clever," even they came crowding about her, like flies about a milk-pail it was Lady Niton who drew Isabel Fotheringham's attention to it loudly and repeatedly. It was she also who, at a pause in the dancing and at a hint from Mrs. Colwood, insisted on making Diana sing, to the grand piano which had been pushed into a corner of the hall. And when the singing, helped by the looks and personality of the singer, had added to the girl's success, Lady Niton sat fanning herself in reflected triumph, appealing to the spectators on all sides for applause. The topics that Diana fled from, Lady Niton took up ; and when Mrs. Fotheringham, bewildered by an avalanche of words, would say " Give me time, please, Lady Niton I must think!" Lady Niton would reply, coolly " Not unless you're accus- tomed to it"; while she finally capped her misdeeds by insisting that it was no good to say Mr. Barton had a warm heart if he were without that much more useful possession a narrow mind. Thus buttressed and befriended on almost all sides, Diana drank her cup of pleasure. Once in an interval between two dances, as she passed on Oliver Marsham's arm, close to Lady Lucy, that lady put up her frail old hand, and gently touched Diana's. "Do not overtire yourself, my dear!" she said, with effusion; and Oliver, looking down, knew very well what his mother's rare 103 The Testing of Diana Mallory effusion meant, if Diana did not. On several occasions Mr. Ferrier sought her out, with every mark of flattering attention, while it often seemed to Diana as if the protecting kindness of Sir James Chide was never far away. In her white ingenue's dress she was an embodi- ment of youth, simplicity, and joy, such as perhaps our grandmothers knew more commonly than we, in our more hurried and complex day. And at the same time there floated round her something more than youth something more thrilling and challenging than mere girlish delight an effluence, a passion, a " swell of soul," which made this dawn of her life more bewitching even for its promise than for its performance. For Marsham, too, the hours flew. He was carried away, enchanted; he had eyes for no one, time for no one but Diana; and before the end of the evening the gossip among the Tallyn guests ran fast and free. When at last the dance broke up, many a curious eye watched the parting between Marsham and Diana; and in their bedroom on the top floor Lady Lucy's two nieces sat up till the small hours discussing, first, the situation was Oliver really caught at last ? and then, Alicia's refusal to discuss it. She had said bluntly that she was dog- tired and shut her door upon them. / On a hint from his mother, Marsham went to say good-night to her in her room. She threw her arms round his neck, whispering: "Dear Oliver! dear Oli- ver! I just wished you to know if it is as I think that you had my blessing." He drew back, a little shrinking and reluctant yet still flushed, as it were, with the last rays Diana's sun had shed upon him. 104 The Testing of Diana Mallory "Things mustn't be hurried, mother." "No no they sha'n't. But you know how I have wished to see you happy how ambitious I have been for you!" " Yes, mother, I know. You have been always very good to me." He had recovered his composure, and stood holding her hand and smiling at her. "What a charming creature, Oliver! It is a pity, of course, her father has indoctrinated her with those opinions, but " "Opinions!" he said, scornfully "what do they mat- ter!" But he could not discuss Diana. His blood was still too hot within him. "Of course of course!" said Lady Lucy, soothingly. "She is so young she will develop. But what a wife, Oliver, she will make how she might help a man on with her talents and her beauty and her refinement. She has such dignity, too, for her years." He made no reply, except to repeat : " Don't hurry it, mother don't hurry it." "No no" she said, laughing "I am not such a fool. There will be many natural opportunities of meeting." " There are some difficulties with the Vavasours. They have been disagreeable about the gardens. Ferrier and I have promised to go over and advise her." "Good!" said Lady Lucy, delighted that the Vava- sours had been disagreeable. "Good-night, my son, good-night!" A minute later Oliver stood meditating in his own room, where he had just donned his smoking- jacket. By one of the natural ironies of life, at a moment when he was more in love than he had ever been yet, he was, a 105 The Testing of Diana Mallorg nevertheless, thinking eagerly of prospects and of money. Owing to his peculiar relation to his mother, and his fa- ther's estate, marriage would be to him no mere satisfac- tion of a personal passion. It would be a vital incident in a politician's career, to whom larger means and greater independence were now urgently necessary. To marry with his mother's full approval would at last bring about that provision for himself which his father's will had most unjustly postponed. He was monstrously depend- ent upon her. It had been one of the chief checks on a strong and concentrated ambition. But Lady Lucy had long made him understand that to marry according to her wishes would mean emancipation: a much larger in- come in the present, and the final settlement of her will in his favor. It was amazing how she had taken to Diana! Diana had only to accept him, and his future was secured. But though thoughts of this kind passed in tumultuous procession through the grooves of consciousness, they were soon expelled by others. Marsham was no mere interested schemer. Diana should help him to his career; but above all and before all she was the adorable brown- eyed creature, whose looks had just been shining upon him, whose soft hand had just been lingering in his! As he stood alone and spellbound in the dark, yielding himself to the surging waves of feeling which broke over his mind, the thought, the dream, of holding Diana Mallory in his arms of her head against his breast came upon him with a sudden and stinging delight. Yet the delight was under control the control of a keen and practical intelligence. There rose in him a sharp sense of the unfathomed depths and possibilities in such a nature as Diana's. Once or twice that evening, 106 The Testing off Diana Mallory through all her sweet forthcomingness, when he had forced the note a little, she had looked at him in sudden surprise or shrinking. No! nothing premature! It seemed to him, as it had seemed to Bobbie Forbes, that she could only be won by the slow and gradual conquest of a rich personality. He set himself to the task. Down - stairs Mr. Ferrier and Sir James Chide were sitting together in a remote corner of the hall. Mr. Ferrier, in great good-humor with the state of things, was discussing Oliver's chances, confidentially, with his old friend. Sir James sat smoking in silence. He lis- tened to Ferrier's praises of Miss Mallory, to his gen- erous appreciation of Marsham's future, to his specu- lations as to what Lady Lucy would do for her son, upon his marriage, or as to the part which a creature so brilliant and so winning as Diana might be expected to play in London and in political life. f Sir James said little or nothing. He knew Lady Lucy well, and had known her long. Presently he rose abruptly and went up-stairs to bed. "Ought I to speak?" he asked himself, in an agony of doubt. " Perhaps a word to Ferrier ? No! impossible! impossible! Yet, as he mounted the stairs, over the house which had just seen the tri- umph of Diana, over that radiant figure itself, the sec- ond sight of the great lawyer perceived the brooding of a cloud of fate; nor could he do anything to avert or soften its downfall.! Meanwhile Diana's golden hour had found an unex- pected epilogue. After her good-night to Marsham she was walking along the gallery corridor going toward her 107 The Testing of Diana Mallorg room, when she perceived Miss Vincent in front of her moving slowly and, as it seemed, with difficulty. A sudden impulse made Diana fly after her. "Do let me help you!" she said, shyly. Marion Vincent smiled, and put her hand in the girl's arm. " How do people manage to live at all in these big houses, and with dinner-parties every night!" she said, laughing. " After a day in the East End I am never half so tired." She was indeed so pale that Diana was rather fright- ened, and remembering that in the afternoon she had seen Miss Vincent descend from an upper floor, she of- fered a rest in her own room, which was close by, before the evidently lame woman attempted further stairs. Marion Vincent hesitated a moment, then accepted. Diana hurried up a chair to the fire, installed her there, and herself sat on the floor watching her guest with some anxiety. Yet, as she did so, she felt a certain antagonism. The face, of which the eyes were now closed, was nobly grave. The expression of its deeply marked lines appealed to her heart. But why this singularity this eccentricity ? Miss Vincent wore the same dress of dark woollen stuff, garnished with white frills, in which she had appeared the night before, and her morning attire, as Mr. Frobisher had foretold, had consisted of a precisely similar garment, adorned with a straight collar instead of frills. Surely a piece of acting ! of unnecessary self-assertion ! Yet all through the day and the evening Diana had been conscious of this woman's presence, in a strange penetrating way, even when they had had least to do with each other. In the intervals of her own joyous 1 08 The Testing of Diana Mallory progress she had been often aware of Miss Vincent sit- ting apart, sometimes with Mr. Frobisher, who was read- ing or talking to her, sometimes with Lady Lucy, and during the dance with John Barton. Barton might have been the Jeremiah or the Ezekiel of the occasion. He sat astride upon a chair, in his respectable work- man's clothes, his eyes under their shaggy brows, his weather-beaten features and compressed lips express- ing an ill-concealed contempt for the scene before him. It was rumored that he had wished to depart before din- ner, having concluded his consultation with Mr. Ferrier, but that Mrs. Fotheringham had persuaded him to remain for the night. His presence seemed to make dancing a misdemeanor, and the rich house, with its services and appurtenances, an organized crime. But if his personality was the storm - point of the scene, charged with potential lightning, Marion Vincent's was the still small voice, without threat or bitterness, which every now and then spoke to a quick imagination like Diana's its message from a world of poverty and pain. And sometimes Diana had been startled by the percep- tion that the message seemed to be specially for her. Miss Vincent's eyes followed her; whenever Diana passed near her, she smiled she admired. But always, as it seemed to Diana, with a meaning behind the smile. Yet what that meaning might be the girl could not tell. At last, as she watched her, Marion Vincent looked up. " Mr. Barton would talk to me just now about the history of his own life. I suppose it was the dance and the supper excited him. He began to testify! Sometimes when he does that he is magnificent. He said some fine things to-night. But I am run down and couldn't stand it," 109 The Testing of Diana Mallorg Diana asked if Mr. Barton had himself gone through a great struggle with poverty. "The usual struggle. No more than thousands of others. Only in him it is vocal he can reflect upon it. You had an easy triumph over him last night," she added, with a smile, turning to her companion. "Who wouldn't have?" cried Diana. "What out- rageous things he said!" " He doesn't know much about India or the Colonies. He hasn't travelled; he reads very little. He showed badly. But on his own subjects he is good enough. I have known him impress or convert the most unlikely people by nothing but a bare sincerity. Just now while the servants were handing champagne he and I were standing a little way off under the gallery. His eyes are weak, and he can't bear the glare of all these lights. Suddenly he told me the story of his father's death." She paused, and drew her hand across her eyes. Diana saw that they were wet. But although startled, the girl held herself a little aloof and erect, as though ready at a moment's notice to defend herself against a softening which might involve a treachery to glorious and sacred things. "It so chanced" Miss Vincent resumed "that it had a bearing on experiences of my own just now." " You are living in the East End?" " At present. I am trying to find out the causes of a great wave of poverty and unemployment in a particular district." She named it. " It is hard work and not particularly good for the nerves." She smiled, but at the same moment she turned ex- tremely white, and as she fell back in her chair, Diana no The Testing of Diana Mallorg saw her clinch her hand as though in a strong effort for physical self-control. Diana sprang up. "Let me get you some water!" " Don't go. Don't tell anybody. Just open that win- dow." Diana obeyed, and the northwest wind, sweep- ing in, seemed to revive her pale companion almost at once. "I am very sorry!" said Miss Vincent, after a few minutes, in her natural voice. "Now I am all right." She drank some water, and looked up. " Shall I tell you the story he told me ? It is very short, and it might change your view of him." "If you feel able if you are strong enough," said Diana, uncomfortably, wondering why it should matter to Miss Vincent or anybody else what view she might happen to take of Mr. Barton. " He said he remembered his father (who was a house- painter a very decent and hard-working man) having been out of work for eight weeks. He used to go out looking for work every day and there was the usual story, of course, of pawning or selling all their possessions odd jobs increasing starvation and so on. Mean- while, his only pleasure he was ten was to go with his sister after school to look at two shops in the East India Dock Road one a draper's with a ' Christmas Bazaar ' the other a confectioner's. He declares it made him not more starved, but less, to look at the goodies and the cakes; they imagined eating them; but they were both too sickly, he thinks, to be really hungry. As for the bazaar, with its dolls and toys, and its Father Christmas, and bright lights, they both thought it paradise. They used to flatten their noses against the glass ; sometimes a in The Testing of Diana Mallorg shopman drove them away; but they came back and back. At last the iron shutters would come down slowly. Then he and his sister would stoop and stoop to get a last look. Presently there would be only a foot of bliss left; then they both sank down flat on their stomachs on the pavement, and so stayed greedily till all was dark, and paradise had been swallowed up. Well, one night, the show had been specially gorgeous; they took hands afterward, and ran home. Their father had just come in. Mr. Barton can remember his stagger- ing into the room. I'll give it in his words. ' Mother, have you got anything in the house?' 'Nothing, Tom.' And mother began to cry. ' Not a bit of bread, mother ?' 'I gave the last bit to the children for their teas.' Father said nothing, but he lay down on the bed. Then he called me. 'Johnnie,' he said, 'I've got work for next week but I sha'n't never go to it it's too late,' and then he asked me to hold his hand, and turned his face on the pillow. When my mother came to look, he was dead. ' Starvation and exhaustion ' the doctor said." Marion Vincent paused. " It's just like any other story of the kind isn't it?" Her smile turned on Diana. "The charitable societies and missions send them out by scores in their appeals. But somehow as he told it just now, down-stairs, in that glaring hall, with the champagne going round it seemed intolerable." "And you mean also" said Diana, slowly "that a man with that history can't know or care very much about the Empire?" "Our minds are all picture-books," said the woman beside her, in a low, dreamy voice : " it depends upon 112 The Testing of! Diana Mallorg what the pictures are. To you the words 'England' and the 'Empire' represent one set of pictures all bright and magnificent like the Christmas Bazaar. To John Barton and me" she smiled "they represent another. We too have seen the lights, and the candles, and the toys; we have admired them, as you have; but we know the reality is not there. The reality is in the dark streets, where men tramp, looking for work; it is in the rooms where their wives and children live stifled and hungry the rooms where our working folk die with- out having lived." Her eyes, above her pale cheeks, had opened to their fullest extent the eyes of a seer. They held Diana. So did the voice, which was the voice of one in whom tragic passion and emotion are forever wearing away the physical frame, as the sea waves break down a crumbling shore. Suddenly Diana bent over her, and took her hands. " I wonder why you thought me worth talking to like this?" she said, impetuously. " I liked you!" said Marion Vincent, simply. " I liked you as you talked last night. Only I wanted to add some more pictures to your picture-book. Your set the popular one is called The Glories of England. There is another I recommend it to you: The Shames of England." "You think poverty a disgrace?" murmured Diana, held by the glowing fanatical look of the speaker. "Our poverty is a disgrace the life of our poor is a disgrace. What does the Empire matter what do Afghan campaigns matter while London is rotten? However" (she smiled again, and caressed Diana's hand), "will you make friends with me?" "3 The Testing of Diana Mallorg "Is it worth while for you?" said Diana, laughing. " I shall always prefer my picture-book to yours, I am afraid. And I am not poor and I don't give all my money away." Miss Vincent surveyed her gayly. "Well, I come here," (she looked significantly round the luxurious room) , " and I am very good friends with the Marshams. Oliver Marsham is one of the persons from whom I hope most." "Not in pulling down wealth and property!" cried Diana. " Why not ? Every revolution has its Philippe Egal- it. Oh, it will come slowly it will come slowly," said the other, quietly. "And of course there will be trag- edy there always is in everything. But not, I hope, for you never for you!" And once more her hand dropped softly on Diana's. " You were happy to-night ? you enjoyed the dance ?" The question, so put, with such a look, from another mouth, would have been an impertinence. Diana shrank, but could not resent it. Yet, against her will, she flush- ed deeply. "Yes. It was delightful. I did not expect to enjoy it so much, but " " But you did! That's well. That's good!" Marion Vincent rose feebly. And as she stood, lean- ing on the chair, she touched the folds of Diana's white dress. " When shall I see you again ? and that dress ?" " I shall be in London in May," said Diana, eagerly " May I come then ? You must tell me where." " Ah, you won't come to Bethnal Green in that dress. What a pity!" 114 The Testing of Diana Mallorg Diana helped her to her room, where they shook hands and parted. Then Diana came back to her own quarters. She had put out the electric light for Miss Vincent's sake. The room was lit only by the fire. In the full-length mirror of the toilet-table Diana saw her own white re- flection, and the ivy leaves in her hair. The absence of her mourning was first a pain ; then the joy of the' evening surged up again. Oh, was it wrong, was it wrong to be happy in this world " where men sit and hear each other groan"? She clasped her hands to her soft breast, as though defending the warmth, the hope that were spring- ing there, against any dark protesting force that might threaten to take them from her. CHAPTER VI "T TENRY," said Mrs. Roughsedge to her husband, 11 " I think it would do you good to walk to Beech- cote." " No, my dear, no ! I have many proofs to get through before dinner. Take Hugh. Only Dr. Roughsedge, smiling, held up a beckoning finger. His wife approached. "Don't let him fall in love with that young woman. It's no good." "Well, she must marry somebody, Henry." "Big fishes mate with big fishes minnows with minnows." " Don't run down your own son, sir. Who, pray, is too good for him?" "The world is divided into wise men, fools, and mothers. The characters of the first two are mingled disproportionately in the last," said Dr. Roughsedge, patiently enduring the kiss his wife inflicted on him. " Don't kiss me, Patricia don't tread on my proofs go away and tell Jane not to forget my tea because you have gone out." Mrs. Roughsedge departed, and the doctor, who was devoted to her, sank at once into that disorderly welter of proofs and smoke which represented to him the best of the day. The morning he reserved for hard work, and during the course of it he smoked but one pipe. A 116 The Testing of Diana Mallorg quotation from Fuller which was often on his lips expressed his point of view: "Spill not the morning, which is the quintessence of the day, in recreation. For sleep itself is a recreation. And to open the morning thereto is to add sauce to sauce." But in the afternoon he gave himself to all the de- lightful bye- tasks : the works of supererogation, the ex- cursions into side paths, the niggling with proofs, the toying with style, the potterings and polishings, the ru- minations, and re writings and refinements which make the joy of the man of letters. For five-and-twenty years he had been a busy Cambridge coach, tied year in and year out to the same strictness of hours, the same monotony of subjects, the same patient drumming on thick heads and dull brains. Now that was all over. A brother had left him a little money; he had saved the rest. At sixty he had begun to live. He was editing a series of reprints for the Cambridge University Press, and what mortal man could want more than a good wife and son, a cottage to live in, a fair cook, unlimited pipes, no debts, and the best of English literature to browse in? The rural afternoon, especially, when he smoked and grub- bed and divagated as he pleased, was alone enough to make the five-and-twenty years of " swink" worth while. Mrs. Roughsedge stayed to give very particular orders to the house-parlormaid about the doctor's tea, to open a window in the tiny drawing-room, and to put up in brown paper a pair of bed-socks that she had just finished knitting for an old man in one of the parish-houses. Then she joined her son, who was already waiting for her impatiently in the garden. Hugh Roughsedge had only just returned from a month's stay in London, made necessary by those new 117 The Testing of Diana Mallory Army examinations which his soul detested. By dint of strenuous coaching he had come off moderately victorious, and had now returned home for a week's extra leave before rejoining his regiment. One of the first questions on his tongue, as his mother instantly noticed, had been a question as to Miss Mallory. Was she still at Beechcote? Had his mother seen anything of her? Yes, she was still at Beechcote. Mrs. Roughsedge, however, had seen her but seldom and slightly since her son's departure for London. If she had made one or two observations from a distance, with respect to the young lady, she withheld them. And like the discerning mother that she was, at the very first opportunity she proposed a call at Beechcote. On their way thither, this February afternoon, they talked in a desultory way about some new War-Office reforms, which, as usual, the entire Army believed to be merely intended wilfully and deliberately for its de- struction; about a recent gambling scandal in the regi- ment, or the peculiarities of Hugh's commanding officer. Meanwhile he held his peace on the subject of some letters he had received that morning. There was to be an ex- pedition in Nigeria. Officers were wanted; and he had volunteered. The result of his application was not yet known. He had no intention whatever of upsetting his parents till it was known. " I wonder how Miss Mallory liked Tallyn," said Mrs. Roughsedge, briskly. She had already expressed the same wonder once or twice. But as neither she nor her son had any materials for deciding the point the remark hardly promoted con- versation. She added to it another of more effect. 118 The Testing o Diana Mallory "The Miss Bertrams have already made up their minds that she is to marry Oliver Marsham." "The deuce!" cried the startled Roughsedge. "Beg your pardon, mother, but how can those old cats possibly know?" "They can't know," said Mrs. Roughsedge, placidly. "But as soon as you get a young woman like that into the neighborhood, of course everybody begins to specu- late." "They mumble any fresh person, like a dog with a bone," said Roughsedge, indignantly. They were passing across the broad village street. On either hand were old timbered cottages, sun-mellowed and rain-beaten ; a thatched roof showing here and there ; or a bit of mean new building, breaking the time-worn line. To their left, keeping watch over the graves which encircled it, rose the fourteenth-century church; amid the trees around it rooks were cawing and wheeling; and close beneath it huddled other cottages, ivy-grown, about the village well. Afternoon school was just over, and the children were skipping and running about the streets. Through the cottage doors could be seen oc- casionally the gleam of a fire or a white cloth spread for tea. For the womenfolk, at least, tea was the great meal of the day in Beechcote. So that what with the flickering of the fires, and the sunset light on the win- dows, the skipping children, the dogs, the tea-tables, and the rooks, Beechcote wore a cheerful and idyllic air. But Mrs. Roughsedge knew too much about these cottages. In this one to the left a girl had just borne her second illegitimate child; in that one farther on were two mentally deficient children, the offspring of feeble-mind- ed parents; in the next, an old woman, the victim of 119 The Testing of Diana Mallory pernicious anaemia, was moaning her life away; in the last to the right the mother of five small children had just died in her sixth confinement. Mrs. Roughsedge gave a long sigh as she looked at it. The tragedy was but forty-eight hours old ; she had sat up with the mother through her dying hours. "Oh, my dear!" said Mrs. Roughsedge, suddenly "here comes the Vicar. Do you know, it's so unlucky and so strange ! but he has certainly taken a dislike to Miss Mallory I believe it was because he had hoped some Christian Socialist friends of his would have taken Beechcote, and he was disappointed to find it let to some one with what he calls "silly Tory notions" and no particular ideas about Church matters. Now there's a regular fuss something about the Book Club. I don't understand The Vicar advanced toward them. He came along at a great pace, his lean figure closely sheathed in his long clerical coat, his face a little frowning and set. At the sight of Mrs. Roughsedge he drew up, and greeted the mother and son. "May I have a few words with you?" he asked Mrs. Roughsedge, as he turned back with them toward the Beechcote lane. " I don't know whether you are ac- quainted, Mrs. Roughsedge, with what has just hap- pened in the Book Club, to which we both belong?" The Book Club was a village institution of some antiquity. It embraced some ten families, who drew up their Mudie lists in common and sent the books from house to house. The Vicar and Dr. Roughsedge had been till now mainly responsible for these lists so far, at least, as "serious books" were concerned, the ladies being allowed the chief voice in the novels. 120 The Testing of Diana Mallory Mrs. Roughsedge, a little fluttered, asked for informa- tion. "Miss Mallory has recommended two books which, in my opinion, should not be circulated among us," said the Vicar. " I have protested in vain. Miss Mallory maintains her recommendation. I propose, therefore, to withdraw from the Club." "Are they improper?" cried Mrs. Roughsedge, much distressed. Captain Roughsedge threw an angry look first at his mother and then at the Vicar. " Not in the usual sense," said the Vicar, stiffly "but highly improper for the reading of Christian people. One is by a Unitarian, and the other reproduces some of the worst speculations of an infidel German theology. I pointed out the nature of the books to Miss Mallory. She replied that they were both by authors whom her father liked. I regretted it. Then she fired up, refused to withdraw the names, and offered to resign. Miss Mallory's subscription to the Club is, however, much larger than mine. / shall therefore resign protesting, of course, against the reason which induces me to take this course." "What's wrong with the books?" asked Hugh Rough- sedge. The Vicar drew himself up. " I have given my reasons." " Why, you see that kind of thing in every newspaper," said Roughsedge, bluntly. " All the more reason why I should endeavor to keep my parish free from it," was the Vicar's resolute reply. " However, there is no more to be said. I wished Mrs. Roughsedge to understand what had happened that is all." 9 121 The Testing of Diana Mallory He paused, and offered a limp hand in good-bye. " Let me speak to Miss Mallory," said Mrs. Roughsedge, soothingly. The Vicar shook his head. "She is a young lady of strong will." And with a hasty nod of farewell to the Captain, whose hostility he divined, he walked away. "And what about obstinate and pig-headed parsons!" said Roughsedge, hotly, addressing his remark, however, safely to the Vicar's back, and to his mother. "Who makes him a judge of what we shall read! I shall make a point of asking for both the books!" "Oh, my dear Hugh!" cried his mother, in rather troubled protest. Then she happily reflected that if he asked for them, he was not in the least likely to read them. "I hope Miss Mallory is not really an unbe- liever." " Mother! Of course, what that poker in a wideawake did was to say something uncivil about her father, and she wasn't going to stand that. Quite right, too." " She did come to church on Christmas Day," said Mrs. Roughsedge, reflecting. " But, then, a great many people do that who don't believe anything. Anyway, she has always been quite charming to your father and me. And I think, besides, the Vicar might have been satisfied with your father's opinion he made no complaint about the books. Oh, now the Miss Bertrams are going to stop us! They'll of course know all about it!" If Captain Roughsedge growled ugly words into his mustache, his mother was able to pretend not to hear them, in the gentle excitement of shaking hands with the Miss Bertrams. These middle-aged ladies, the daughters 122 The Testing of Diana Mallorij of a deceased doctor from the neighboring county town of Dunscombe, were, if possible, more plainly dressed than usual, and their manners more forbidding. " You will have heard of this disagreeable incident which has occurred," said Miss Maria to Mrs. Roughsedge, with a pinched mouth. " My sister and I shall, of course, remove our names from the Club." " I say don't your subscribers order the books they like?" asked Roughsedge, half wroth and half laughing, surveying the lady with his hand on his side. "There is a very clear understanding among us," said Miss Maria, sharply, " as to the character of the books to be ordered. No member of the Club has yet trans- gressed it." "There must be give and take, mustn't there?" said Miss Elizabeth, in a deprecatory voice. She was the more amiable and the weaker of the two sisters. " We should never order books that would be offensive to Miss Mallory." " But if you haven't read the books ?" "The Vicar's word is quite enough," said Miss Maria, with her most determined air. They all moved on together, Captain Roughsedge smoothing or tugging at his mustache with a restless hand. But Miss Bertram, presently, dropping a little behind, drew Mrs. Roughsedge with her. "There are all sorts of changes at the house," she said, confidentially. " The laundry maids are allowed to go out every evening, if they like and Miss Mallory makes no attempt to influence the servants to come to church. The Vicar says the seats' for the Beechcote servants have never been so empty." 123 The Testing of Diana Mallory "Dear, dear!" murmured Mrs. Roughsedge. "And money is improperly given away. Several people whom the Vicar thinks most unfit objects of charity have been assisted. And in a conversation with her last week Miss Mallory expressed herself in a very sad way about foreign missions. Her father's idea, again, no doubt but it is all very distressing. The Vicar doubts " Miss Maria spoke warily, bringing her face very close to the gray curls " whether she has ever been confirmed." This final stroke, however, fell flat. Mrs. Roughsedge showed no emotion. "Most of my aunts," she said, stoutly, "were never confirmed, and they were good Christians and communicants all their lives." Miss Maria's expression showed that this reference to a preceding barbaric age of the Church had no rele- vance to the existing order of things. "Of course," she added, hastily, "I do not wish to make myself troublesome or conspicuous in any way. I merely mention these things as explaining why the Vicar felt bound to make a stand. The Church feeling in this parish has been so strong it would, indeed, be a pity if anything occurred to weaken it." Mrs. Roughsedge gave a doubtful assent. As to the Church feeling, she was not so clear as Miss Bertram. One of her chief friends was a secularist cobbler who lived under the very shadow of the church. The Miss Bertrams shuddered at his conversation. Mrs. Rough- sedge found him racy company, and he presented to her aspects of village life and opinion with which the Miss Bertrams were not at all acquainted. As the mother and son approached the old house in the sunset light, its aspect of mellow and intimate congruity 124 The Testing of Diana Mallory with the woods and fields about it had never been more winning. The red, gray, and orange of its. old brick- work played into the brown and purples of its engirdling trees, into the lilacs and golds and crimsons of the west- ern sky behind it, into the cool and quiet tones of the meadows from which it rose. A spirit of beauty had been at work fusing man's perishable and passing work with Nature's eternal masterpiece; so that the old house had in it something immortal, and the light which played upon it something gently personal, relative, and fleet- ing. Winter was still dominant; a northeast wind blew. But on the grass under the spreading oaks which sheltered the eastern front a few snow-drops were out. And Diana was gathering them. She came toward her visitors with alacrity. "Oh! what a long time since you have been to see me!" Mrs. Roughsedge explained that she had been enter- taining some relations, and Hugh had been in London. She hoped that Miss Mallory had enjoyed her stay at Tallyn. It certainly seemed to both mother and son that the ingenuous young face colored a little as its owner replied "Thank you it was very amusing" and then added, with a little hesitation " Mr. Marsham has been kindly advising me since, about the gardens and the Vavasours. They were to keep up the gardens, you know and now they practically leave it to me which isn't fair." Mrs. Roughsedge secretly wondered whether this state- ment was meant to account for the frequent presence of Oliver Marsham at Beechcote. She had herself met him in the lane riding away from Beechcote no less than three times during the past fortnight. "Please come in to tea!" said Diana; "I am just ex- 125 The Testing of Diana Mallory pecting my cousin Miss Merton. Mrs. Colwood and I are so excited! we have never had a visitor here before. I came out to try and find some snow-drops for her room. There is really nothing in the greenhouses and I can't make the house look nice." Certainly as they entered and passed through the panelled hall to the drawing-room Hugh Roughsedge saw no need for apology. Amid the warm dimness of the house he was aware of a few starry flowers, a few gleam- ing and beautiful stuffs, the white and black of an en- graving, or the blurred golds and reds of an old Italian picture, humble school-work perhaps, collected at small cost by Diana's father, yet still breathing the magic of the Enchanted Land. The house was refined, pleading, eager like its mistress. ^ It made no display but it admitted no vulgarity. ' " These things are not here for mere decoration's sake," it seemed to say. Dear kind hands have touched them; dear silent voices have spoken of them. Love them a little, you also! and be at home.'* Not that Hugh Roughsedge made any such conscious analysis of his impressions. Yet the house appealed to him strangely. He thought Miss Mallory's taste marvel- lous; and it is one of the superiorities in women to which men submit most readily. The drawing-room had especially a festive air. Mrs. Colwood was keeping tea-cakes hot, and building up a blazing fire with logs of beech-wood. When she had seated her guests, Diana put the snow-drops she had gathered into an empty vase, and looked round her happily, as though now she had put the last touch to all her preparations. She talked readily of her cousin's coming to Mrs. Roughsedge; and she inquired minutely 126 The Testing of Diana Mallory of Hugh when the next meet was to be, that she might take her guest to see it. "Fanny will be just as new to it all as I!" she said. " That's so nice, isn't it ?" Then she offered Mrs. Rough- sedge cake, and looked at her askance with a hanging head. "Have you heard about the Vicar?" Mrs. Roughsedge admitted it. "I did lose my temper," said Diana, repentantly. "But really! papa used to tell me it was a sign of weakness to say violent things you couldn't prove. Wasn't it Lord Shaftesbury that said" some book he didn't like was "vomited out of the jaws of hell"? Well, the Vicar said things very like that. He did in- deed!" "Oh no, my dear, no!" cried Mrs. Roughsedge, dis- turbed by the quotation, even, of such a remark. Hugh Roughsedge grinned. Diana, however, insisted. " Of course, I would have given them up. Only I just happened to say that papa always read everything he could by those two men and then" she flushed " Well, I don't exactly remember what Mr. Lavery said. But I know that when he'd said it I wouldn't have given up either of those books for the world!" " I hope, Miss Mallory, you won't think of giving them up," said Hugh, with vigor. "It will be an excellent thing for Lavery." Mrs. Roughsedge, as the habitual peacemaker of the village, said hastily that Dr. Roughsedge should talk to the Vicar. Of course, he must not be allowed to do any- thing so foolish as to withdraw from the Club, or the Miss Bertrams either." "Oh! my goodness," cried Diana, hiding her face and then raising it, crimson. "The Miss Bertrams, too! 137 The Testing of Diana Mallorg Why, it's only six weeks since I first came to this place, and now I'm setting it by the ears!" Her aspect of mingled mirth and dismay had in it something so childish and disarming that Mrs. Rough- sedge could only wish the Vicar had been there to see. His heretical parishioner fell into meditation. "What can I do? If I could only be sure that he would never say things like that to me again " But he will!" said Captain Roughsedge. " Don't give in, Miss Mallory." "Ah!" said Mrs. Roughsedge, as the door opened, " shall we ask Mr. Marsham ?" Diana turned with a startled movement. It was evident that Marsham was not expected. But Mrs. Roughsedge also inferred from a shrewd observation of her hostess that he was not unwelcome. He had, in fact, looked in on' his way home from hunting to give a message from his mother; that, at least, was the pretext. Hugh Roughsedge, reading him with a hostile eye, said to himself that if it hadn't been Lady Lucy it would have been something else. As it happened, he was quite as well aware as his mother that Marsham's visits to Beech- cote of late had been far more frequent than mere neigh- borliness required. Marsham was in hunting dress, and made his usual handsome and energetic impression. Diana treated him with great self-possession, asking after Mr. Ferrier, who had just returned to Tallyn for the last fortnight before the opening of Parliament, and betraying to the Rough- sedges that she was already on intimate terms with Lady Lucy, who was lending her patterns for her embroidery, driving over once or twice a week, and advising her about various household affairs. Mrs. Roughsedge, who had 128 The Testing of Diana Mallory been Diana's first protector, saw herself supplanted not without a little natural chagrin. The controversy of the moment was submitted to Marsham, who decided hotly against the Vicar, and implored Diana to stand firm. But somehow his inter- vention only hastened the compunction that had already begun to work in her. She followed the Roughsedges to the door when they departed. "What must I do?" she said, sheepishly, to Mrs. Roughsedge. "Write to him?" "The Vicar? Oh, dear Miss Mallory, the doctor will settle it. You would change the books?" "Mother!" cried Hugh Roughsedge, indignantly, "we're all bullied you know we are and now you want Miss Mallory bullied too." "'Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow,' " laughed Marsham, in the background, as he stood toying with his tea beside Mrs. Colwood. Diana shook her head. " I can't be friends with him," she said, naively, " for a long long time. But I'll rewrite my list. And must I go and call on the Miss Bertrams to-morrow?" Her mock and smiling submission, as she stood, slender and lovely, amid the shadows of the hall, seemed to Hugh Roughsedge, as he looked back upon her, the prettiest piece of acting. Then she turned, and he knew that she was going back to Marsham. At the same moment he saw Mrs. Colwood's little figure disappearing up the main stairway. Frowning and silent, he followed his mother out of the house. Diana looked round rather wistfully for Mrs. Colwood as she re-entered the room; but that lady had many letters to write. 129 The Testing of Diana Mallory Marsham noticed Mrs. Colwood's retreat with a thrill of pleasure. Yet even now he had no immediate declara- tion in his mind. The course that he had marked out for himself had been exactly followed. There had been no "hurrying it." Only in these weeks before Parliament, while matters of great moment to his own political future were going forward, and his participation in them was not a whit less cool and keen than it had always been, he had still found abundant time for the wooing of Diana. He had assumed a kind of guardian's attitude in the matter of her relations to the Vavasours who in business affairs had proved both greedy and muddle-headed; he had flattered her woman's vanity by the insight he had freely allowed her into the possibilities and the difficulties of his own Parliamentary position, and of his relations to Ferrier; and he had kept alive a kind of perpetual interest and flutter in her mind concerning him, by the challenge he was perpetually offering to the opinions and ideas in which she had been brought up while yet com- bining it with a respect toward her father's memory, so courteous, and, in truth, sincere, that she was alter- nately roused and subdued. On this February evening, it seemed to his exultant sense, as Diana sat chatting to him beside the fire, that his power with her had substantially advanced, that by a hundred subtle signs quite involuntary on her part she let him understand that his personality was pressing upon hers, penetrating her will, transforming her gay and fearless composure. For instance, he had been lending her books repre- senting his own political and social opinions. To her they were anathema. Her father's soul in her regarded them as forces of the pit, rising in ugly clamor to drag 130 The Testing of Diana Mallory down England from her ancient place. But to hate and shudder at them from afar had been comparatively easy. To battle with them at close quarters, as presented by this able and courteous antagonist, who passed so easily and without presumption from the opponent into the teacher, was a more teasing matter. She had many small successes and side- victories, but they soon ceased to satisfy her, in presence of the knowledge and ability of a man who had been ten years in Parliament, and had made for himself she began to understand a considerable position there. She was hotly loyal to her own faiths; but she was conscious of what often seemed to her a dangerous and demoralizing interest in his! A demor- alizing pleasure, too, in listening in sometimes laying aside the watchful, hostile air, in showing herself sweet, yielding, receptive. These melting moods, indeed, were rare. But no one watching the two on this February evening could have failed to see in Diana signs of happiness, of a joyous and growing dependence, of something that refused to know itself, that masqueraded now as this feeling, now as that, yet was all the time stealing upon the sources of life, bewitching blood and brain. Marsham lamented that in ten days he and his mother must be in town for the Parliamentary season. Diana clearly endeavored to show nothing more than a polite regret. But in the half- laughing, half-forlorn requests she made to him for ad- vice in certain practical matters which must be decided in his absence she betrayed herself ; and Marsham found it amazingly sweet that she should do so. He said eagerly that he and Lady Lucy must certainly come down to Tallyn every alternate Sunday, so that the various small matters he had made Diana intrust to him The Testing of Diana Mallorij the finding of a new gardener; negotiations with the Vavasours, connected with the cutting of certain trees or the repairs of a ruinous gable of the house should still be carried forward with all possible care and speed. Whereupon Diana inquired how such things could pos- sibly engage the time and thought of a politician in the full stream of Parliament. "They will be much more interesting to me," said Marsham, in a low steady voice, " than anything I shall be doing in Parliament." Diana rose, in sudden vague terror as though with the roar in her ears of rapids ahead murmured some stammering thanks, walked across the room, lowered a lamp which was flaming, and recovered all her smiling self-possession. But she talked no more of her own af- fairs. She asked him, instead, for news of Miss Vincent. Marsham answered, with difficulty. If there had been sudden alarm in her, there had been a sudden tumult of the blood in him. He had almost lost his hold upon himself; the great words had been almost spoken. But when the conversation had been once more guided into normal channels, he felt that he had escaped a risk. No, no, not yet! One false step one check and he might still find himself groping in the dark. Better let himself be missed a little ! than move too soon. As to Roughsedge he had kept his eyes open. There was nothing there. So he gave what news of Marion Vincent he had to give. She was still in Bethnal Green working at her inquiry, often very ill, but quite indomitable. As soon as Parliament began she had promised to do some secretarial work for Marsham on two or three mornings a week. 132 The Testing o* Diana Mallory "I saw her last week," said Marsham. "She always asks after you." "I am so glad! I fell in love with her. Surely" Diana hesitated "surely some day she will marry Mr. Frobisher?" Marsham shook his head. " I think she feels herself too frail." Diana remembered that little scene of intimacy of tenderness and Marsham's words stirred about her, as it were, winds of sadness and renunciation. She shivered under them a little, feeling, almost guiltily, the glow of her own life, the passion of her own hopes. Marsham watched her as she sat on the other side of the fire, her beautiful head a little bent and pensive, the firelight playing on the oval of her cheek. How glad he was that he had not spoken! that the barrier between them still held. A man may find heaven or hell on the other side of it. But merely to have crossed it makes life the poorer. One more of the great, the irrevocable moments spent and done yielded to devouring time. He hugged the thought that it was still before him. The very timidity and anxiety he felt were delightful to him; he had never felt them before. And once more involun- tarily, disagreeably he thought of Alicia Drake, and of the passages between them in the preceding summer. Alicia was still at Tallyn, and her presence was, in truth, a constant embarrassment to him. Lady Lucy, on the contrary, had a strong sense of family duty toward her young cousin, and liked to have her for long visits at Tallyn or in London. Marsham believed his mother knew nothing of the old flirtation between them. Alicia, indeed, rarely showed any special interest in him now. He admitted her general discretion. Yet occasionally 133 The Testing of Diana Mallorg she would put in a claim, a light word, now mocking, now caressing, which betrayed the old intimacy, and Marsham would wince under it. It was like a creeping touch in the dark. He had known what it was to feel both compunction and a kind of fear with regard to Alicia. But, normally, he told himself that both feelings were ridiculous. He had done nothing to compromise either himself or her. He had certainly flirted with Alicia; but he could not honestly feel that the chief part in the matter had been his. These thoughts passed in a flash. The clock struck, and regretfully he got up to take his leave. Diana rose, too, with a kindling face. "My cousin will be here directly!" she said, joyously. "Shall I find her installed when I come next time?" " I mean to keep her as long as long as ever I Can!" Marsham held her hand close and warm a moment, felt her look waver a second beneath his, and then, with a quick and resolute step, he went his way. He was just putting on his coat in the outer hall when there was a sound of approaching wheels. A carriage stopped at the door, to which the butler hurried. As he opened it Marsham saw in the light of the porch lamp the face of a girl peering out of the carriage window. It was a little awkward. His own horse was held by a groom on the other side of the carriage. There was nothing to do but to wait till the young lady had passed. He drew to one side. Miss Merton descended. There was just time for Marsham to notice an extravagant hat, smothered in ostrich feathers, a large-featured, rather handsome face, framed in a tangled mass of black hair, a pair of sharp eyes that seemed to take in hungrily all they Saw the The Testing of Diana Mallory old hall, the butler, and himself, as he stood in the shadow. He heard the new guest speak to the butler about her luggage. Then the door of the inner hall opened, and he caught Diana's hurrying feet, and her cry "Fanny!" He passed the lady and escaped. As he rode away into, the darkness of the lanes he was conscious of an impression which had for the moment checked the happy flutter of blood and pulse. Was that the long- expected cousin? Poor Diana! A common - looking, vulgar young woman with a most unpleasant voice and JL- accent. An unpleasant manner, too, to the servants half arrogant, half familiar. What a hat! and what a fringe! worthy of some young "lidy" in the Old Kent Road ! The thought of Diana sitting at table with such a person on equal terms pricked him with annoyance; . for he had all his mother's fastidiousness, though it showed itself in different forms. He blamed Mrs. Col- wood Diana ought to have been more cautiously guid- ed. The thought of all the tender preparation made for the girl was both amusing and repellent. Miss Merton, he understood, was Diana's cousin on the mother's side the daughter of her mother's sister. A swarm of questions suddenly arose in his mind questions not hitherto entertained. Had there been, in fact, a mesalliance some disagreeable story which ac- counted, perhaps, for the self-banishment of Mr. Mallory ? the seclusion in which Diana had been brought up ? The idea was most unwelcome, but the sight of Fanny Merton had inevitably provoked it. And it led on to a good many other ideas and speculations of a mingled sort connected, now with Diana, now with recollections, J 35 The Testing of Diana Mallory pleasant and unpleasant, of the eight or ten years which had preceded his first sight of her. For Oliver Marsham was now thirty-six, and he had not reached that age without at least one serious attempt quite apart from any passages with Alicia Drake to provide himself with a wife. Some two years before this date he had proposed to a pretty girl of great family and no money, with whom he supposed himself ardently in love. She, after some hesitation, had refused him, and Marsham had had some reason to believe that in spite of his mother's great fortune and his own expectations, his provenance had not been regarded as sufficiently aris- tocratic by the girl's fond parents. Perhaps had he and not Lady Lucy been the owner of Tallyn and its 18,000 a year, things might have been different. As it was, Marsham had felt the affront, as a strong and self- confident man was likely to feel it ; and it was perhaps in reaction from it that he had allowed himself those pas- sages with Alicia Drake which had, at least, soothed his self-love. In this affair Marsham had acted on one of the con- victions with which he had entered public life that there is no greater help to a politician than a distinguished, clever, and, if possible, beautiful wife. Distinction, Radical though he was, had once seemed to him a matter of family and "connection." But after the failure of his first attempt, "family," in the ordinary sense, had ceased to attract him. Personal breeding, intelligence, and charm these, after all, are what the politician who is already provided with money, wants to secure in his wife; without, of course, any obvious dis- qualification in the way of family history. Diana, as he had first met her among the woods at Portofino, side by 136 The Testing of Diana Mallory side with her dignified and gentlemanly father, had made upon him precisely that impression of personal distinc- tion of which he was in search upon his mother also. The appearance and the accent, however, of the cousin had struck him with surprise; nor was it till he was nearing Tallyn that he succeeded in shaking off the impression. Absurd! Everybody has some relations that require to be masked like the stables, or the back door in a skilful arrangement of life. Diana, his beau- tiful, unapproachable Diana, would soon, no doubt, be relieved of this young lady, with whom she could have no possible interests in common. And, perhaps, on one of his week-end visits to Tallyn and Beechcote, he might get a few minutes' conversation with Mrs. Colwood which would throw some light on the new guest. Diana meanwhile, assisted by Mrs. Colwood, was hovering about her cousin. She and Miss Merton had kissed each other in the hall, and then Diana, seized with a sudden shyness, led her guest into the drawing- room and stood there speechless, a little; holding her by both hands and gazing at her; mastered by feeling and excitement. "Well, you have got a queer old place!" said Fanny Merton, withdrawing herself. She turned and looked about her, at the room, the flowers, the wide hearth, with its blazing logs, at Mrs. Colwood, and finally at Diana. "We are so fond of it already!" said Diana. "Come and get warm." She settled her guest in a chair by the fire, and took a stool beside her. " Did you like Devon- shire?" The girl made a little face. "It was awfully quiet. Oh, my friends, of course, " 137 The Testing of Diana Mallorg made a lot of fuss over me and that kind of thing. But I wouldn't live there, not if you paid me." "We're very quiet here," said Diana, timidly. She was examining the face beside her, with it's bright crude color, its bold eyes, and sulky mouth, slightly underhung. " Oh, well, you've got some good families about, I guess. I saw one or two awfully smart carriages waiting at the station." "There are a good many nice people," murmured Diana. "But there is not much going on." " I expect you could invite a good many here if you wanted," said the girl, once more looking round her. "Whatever made you take this place?" " I like old things so much," laughed Diana. " Don't you?" " Well, I don't know. I think there's more style about a new house. You can have electric light and all that sort of thing." Diana admitted it, and changed the subject. " Had the journey been cold?" Freezing, said Miss Merton. But a young man had lent her his fur coat to put over her knees, which had improved matters. She laughed rather consciously. " He lives near here. I told him I was sure you'd ask him to something, if he called." "Who was he?" With much rattling of the bangles on her wrists, Fanny produced a card from her hand-bag. Diana looked at it in dismay. It was the card of a young solicitor whom she had once met at a local tea-party, and decided to avoid thenceforward. She said nothing, however, and plunged into inquiries as to her aunt and cousins. 138 The Testing of Diana Mallory "Oh! they're all right. Mother's worried out of her life about money; but, then, we've always been that poor you couldn't skin a cent off us, so that's nothing new." Diana murmured sympathy. She knew vagtiely that her father had done a good deal to subsidize these rela- tions. She could only suppose that in his ignorance he had not done enough. Meanwhile Fanny Merton had fixed her eyes upon Diana with a curious hostile look, almost a stare, which had entered them as she spoke of the family poverty, and persisted as they travelled from Diana's face and figure to the pretty and spacious room beyond. She examined everything, in a swift keen scrutiny, and then as the pouncing glance came back to her cousin, the girl sud- denly 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. Fanny Merton had herself changed color, and looked a little embarrassed. She did not repeat her remark^ but began to take her furs off, to smooth her hair deliberately, and settle her bracelets. Diana came nearer to her &s soon as they were alone. "Do you really think I am like mamma?" she said, tremulously, all her eyes fixed upon her cousin. "Well, of course I never saw her!" said Miss Merton, looking down at the fire. " How could I ? But mother has a picture of her, and you're as like as two peas." " I never saw any picture of mamma," said Diana; " I don't know at all what she was like." 139 The Testing of Diana Mallorg "Ah, well " said Miss Merton, still looking down. Then she stopped, and said no more. She took out her handkerchief, and began to rub a spot of mud off her dress. It seemed to Diana that her manner was a little strange, and rather rude. But she had made up her mind there would be peculiarities in Fanny, and she did not mean to be repelled by them. "Shall I take you to your room?" she said. "You must be tired, and we shall be dining directly." Miss Merton allowed herself to be led up-stairs, look- ing curiously round her at every step. "I say, you must be well off!" she burst out, as they came to the head of the stairs, " or you'd never be able to run a place like this!" "Papa left me all his money," said Diana, coloring again. " I hope he wouldn't have thought it extrav- agant." She passed on in front of her guest, holding a candle. Fanny Merton followed. At Diana's statement as to her father's money the girl's face had suddenly resumed its sly hostility. And as Diana walked before her, Miss Merton again examined the house, the furniture, the pictures; but this time, and unknown to Diana, with the air of one half jealous and half contemptuous of all she saw. Part II The soberest saints are more stiff-necked Than the hottest-headed of the wicked." CHAPTER VII I SHALL soon be back," said Diana "very soon. I'll just take this book to Dr. Roughsedge. You don't mind?" The question was addressed in a deprecatory tone to Mrs. Colwood, who stood beside her at the Beechcote front door. Muriel Colwood smiled, and drew the furs closer round the girl's slim throat. " I shall mind very much if you don't stay out a full hour and get a good walk." Diana ran off, followed by her dog. There was some- thing in the manner both of the dog and its mistress that seemed to show impetuous escape and relief. "She looks tired out!" said the little companion to herself, as she turned to enter the hall. " How on earth is she going to get through six weeks of it? or six months!" The house as she walked back through it made upon her the odd impression of having suddenly lost some of its charm. The peculiar sentiment as of a warmly human, yet delicately ordered life, which it had breathed out so freely only twenty-four hours before, seemed to her quick feeling to have been somehow obscured or dissipated. All its defects, old or new the patches in the panelling, the darkness of the passages stood out. 143 The Testing of Diana Mallorg And "all along of Eliza!" All because of Miss Fanny Merton ! Mrs. Colwood recalled the morning Miss Mer- ton's late arrival at the breakfast- table, and the discov- ery from her talk that she was accustomed to breakfast in bed, waited upon by her younger sisters; her conver- sation at breakfast, partly about the prices of clothes and eatables, partly in boasting reminiscence of her win- nings at cards, or in sweepstakes on the "run," on board the steamer. Diana had then devoted herself to the dis- play of the house, and her maid had helped Miss Merton to unpack. The process had been diversified by raids made by Miss Fanny on Diana's own wardrobe, which she had inspected from end to end, to an accompaniment of critical remark. According to her, there was very little that was really "shick" in it, and Diana should change her dressmaker. The number of her own dresses was large; and as to their colors and make, Mrs. Colwood, who had helped to put away some of them, could only suppose that tropical surroundings made tropical tastes. At the same time the contrast between Miss Fanny's wardrobe, and what she herself reported, in every tone of grievance and disgust, of the family poverty, was surprising, though no doubt a great deal of the finery had been as cheaply bought as possible. By luncheon-time Diana had shown some symptoms of fatigue, perhaps Mrs. Colwood hoped! of revolt. She had been already sharply questioned as to the num- ber of servants she kept and the wages they received, as to the people in the neighborhood who gave parties, and the ages and incomes of such young or unmarried men as might be met with at these parties. Miss Merton had boasted already of two love-affairs one the un- successful engagement in Barbadoes, the other "a 144 The Testing of Diana Mallorg near thing" which had enlivened the voyage to Eng- land; and she had extracted a promise from Diana to ask the young solicitor she had met with in the train Mr. Fred Birch to lunch, without delay. Meanwhile she had not of her own initiative said one word of those educational objects, in pursuit of which she was supposed to have come to England. Diana had pro- posed to her the names of certain teachers both of music and languages names which she had obtained with much trouble. Miss Fanny had replied, rather carelessly, that she would think about it. It was at this that the eager 'sweetness of Diana's manner to her cousin had shown its first cooling. And Mrs. Colwood had curiously observed that at the first sign of shrinking on her part, Miss Fanny's demeanor had instantly changed. It had become sugared and flattering to a degree. Everything in the house was "sweet"; the old silver used at table, with the Mallory crest, was praised extravagantly; the cooking no less. Yet still Diana's tired silence had grown; and the watch- ing eyes of this amazing young woman had been, in Mrs. Colwood' s belief, now insolently and now anxiously, aware of it. Insolence! that really, if one came to think of it, had been the note of Miss Merton's whole behavior from the beginning an ill-concealed, hardly restrained in- solence, toward the girl, two years older than herself, who had received her with such tender effusion, and was, moreover, in a position to help her so materially. What could it what did it mean? Mrs. Colwood stood at the foot of the stairs a moment, lost in a trance of wonderment. Her heart was really sore for Diana's disappointment, for the look in her face, 145 The Testing of Diana Mallory as she left the house. How on earth could the visit be shortened and the young lady removed ? The striking of three o'clock reminded Muriel Colwood that she was to take the new-comer out for an hour. They had taken coffee in the morning-room up-stairs, Diana's own sitting-room, where she wrote her letters and followed out the lines of reading her father had laid down for her. Mrs. Colwood returned thither; found Miss Merton, as it seemed to her, in the act of examining the letters in Diana's blotting-book ; and hastily proposed to her to take a turn in the garden. Fanny Merton hesitated, looked at Mrs. Colwood a moment dubiously, and finally walked up to her. "Oh, I don't care about going out, it's so cold and nasty. And, besides, I I want to talk to you." "Miss Mallory thought you might like to see the old gardens," said Mrs. Colwood. " But if you would rather not venture out, I'm afraid I must go and write some letters." " Why, you were writing letters all the morning ! My fingers would drop off if I was to go on at it like that. Do you like being a companion ? I should think it was rather beastly if you ask me. At home they did talk about it for me. But I said: ' No, thank you! My own mistress, if you please!'" The speaker sat down by the fire, raised her skirt of purple cloth, -and stretched a pair of shapely feet to the warmth. Her look was good-humored and lazy. " I am very happy here," said Mrs. Colwood, quietly. "Miss Mallory is so charming and so kind." Miss Fanny cleared her throat, poked the fire with the tip of her shoe, fidgeted with her dress, and finally said abruptly : 146 The Testing oil Diana Mallory "I say have all the people about here called?" The tone was so low and furtive that Mrs. Col wood, who had been putting away some embroidery silks which had been left on the table by Diana, turned in some astonishment. She found the girl's eyes fixed upon her eager and hungry. "Miss Mallory has had a great many visitors" she tried to pitch her words in the lightest possible tone " I am afraid it will take her a long time to return all her calls." "Well, I'm glad it's all right about that! anyway. As mamma said, you never know. People are so queer about these things, aren't they? As if it was Diana's fault!" Through all her wrath, Muriel Colwood was conscious of a sudden pang of alarm which was, in truth, the reawakening of something already vaguely felt or sur- mised. She looked rather sternly at her companion. " I really don't know what you mean, Miss Merton. And I never discuss Miss Mallory's affairs. Perhaps you will kindly allow me to go to my letters." She was moving away when the girl beside her laugh- ed again rather angrily and Mrs. Colwood paused, touched again by instinctive fear. " Oh, of course if I'm not to say a word about it I'm not that's all! Well, now, look here Diana needn't suppose that I've come all this way just for fun. I had to say that about lessons, and that kind of thing I didn't want to set her against me but I've . . . Well! why should I be ashamed, I should like to know ?" she broke out, shrilly, sitting erect, her face flushing deeply, her eyes on fire. " If some one owes you something why shouldn't you come and get it ? Diana owes my mother 147 The Testing of Diana Mallorg money! a. lot of money! and we can't afford to lose it. Mother's awfully sweet about Diana she said, ' Oh no, it's unkind' but I say it's unkind to us, not to speak, when we all want money so bad and there are the boys to bring up and "Miss Merton I'm very sorry but really I cannot let you talk to me of Miss Mallory's private affairs. It would neither be right nor honorable. You must see that. She will be in by tea-time herself. Please ! Muriel's tone was gentle; but her attitude was resolu- tion itself. Fanny Merton stared at the frail slim creat- ure in her deep widow's black ; her color rose. "Oh, very well. Do as you like! I'm agreeable! Only I thought perhaps as you and Diana seem to be such tremendous friends you'd like to talk it over with me first. I don't know how much Diana knows; and I thought perhaps you'd give me a hint. Of course, she'll know all there was in the papers. But my mother claims a deal more than the trust money jewels, and that kind of thing. And Uncle Mallory treated us shamefully about them shamefully! That's why I'm come over. I made mother let me! Oh, she's so soft, is mother, she'd let anybody off. But I said, ' Diana's rich, and she ought to make it up to us! If nobody else '11 ask her, I will!' ' The girl had grown pale, but it was a pallor of de- termination and of passion. Mrs. Colwood had listened to the torrent of words, held against her will, first by astonishment, then by something else. If it should be her duty to listen ? for the sake of this young life, which in these few weeks had so won upon her heart? She retraced a few steps. "Miss Merton, I do not understand what you have been saying. If you have any claim upon Miss Mallory, 148 The Testing of Diana Mallory you know well that she is the soul of honor and gen- erosity. Her one desire is to give everybody more than their due. She is too generous I often have to protect her. But, as I have said before, it is not for me to dis- cuss any claim you may have upon her." Fanny Merton was silent for a minute staring at her companion. Then she said, abruptly: "Does she ever talk to you about Aunt Sparling?" "Her mother?" The girl nodded. Mrs. Colwood hesitated then said, unwillingly : " No. She has mentioned her once or twice. One can see how she missed her as a child how she misses her still." "Well, I don't know what call she has to miss her!" cried Fanny Merton, in a note of angry scorn. " A pre- cious good thing she died when she did for everybody." Mrs. Colwood felt her hands trembling. In the grow- ing darkness of the winter afternoon it seemed to her startled imagination as though this black-eyed black- browed girl, with her scowling passionate face, were entering into possession of the house and of Diana an evil and invading power. She tried to choose her words carefully. " Miss Mallory has never talked to me of her parents. And, if you will excuse me, Miss Merton if there is any- thing sad or tragic in their history, I would rather hear it from Miss Mallory than from you!" " Anything sad ? anything sad ? Well, upon my word!" The girl breathed fast. So, involuntarily, did Mrs. Colwood. "You don't mean to say" the speaker threw her body forward, and brought her face close to Mrs. Col- 149 ^he Testing of Diana Mallorg wood "you are not going to tell me that you don't know about Diana's mother?" She laid her hand upon Muriel's dress. ''Why should I know? Please, Miss Merton!" and with a resolute movement Mrs. Colwood tried to with- draw her dress. " Why, everybody knows ! everybody ! everybody ! Ask anybody in the world about Juliet Sparling and you'll see. In the saloon, coming over, J heard people talk about her all one night they didn't know who / was and of course I didn't telj. And there was a book in the ship's library Fqmons Trials or some name of that sort with the whole thing in it. You don't know about Diana's mother ?" The fierce, incredulous emphasis on the last word, for a moment, withered all reply on Mrs. Colwood's lips. She walked, to the door mechanically, to see that it was fast shut. Then she returned. She sat down beside Diana's guest, and it might have been seen that she had silenced fear and dismissed hesitation. "After all," she said, with quiet command, " I think I will ask you, Miss Merton, to explain, what you mean?" The February afternoon darkened round the old house. There was a light powdering of snow on grass and trees. Yet still there were breathings and bird-notes in the air, and tones of color in the distance, which obscurely prophesied the spring. Through the wood behind the house the snow-drops were rising, in a white invading host, over the ground covered with the red-brown deposit of innumerable autumns. Above their glittering white, rose an undergrowth of laurels and box, through which again shot up the magnificent trunks gray and smooth 150 The Testing of Diana Mallory and round of the great beeches, which held and peopled the country-side, heirs of its ancestral forest. Any one standing in the wood could see, through the leafless trees, the dusky blues and rich violets of the encircling hill hung there, like the tapestry of some vast hall; or hear from time to time the loud wings of the wood-pigeons as they clattered through the topmost boughs. Diana was still in the village. She had been spend- ing her hour of escape mostly with the Roughsedges. The old doctor among his books was now sufficiently at his ease with her to pet her, teach her, and, when neces- sary, laugh at her. And Mrs. Roughsedge, however she might feel herself eclipsed by Lady Lucy, was, in truth, much more fit to minister to such ruffled feelings as Diana was now conscious of than that delicate and dignified lady. Diana's disillusion about her cousin was, so far, no very lofty matter. It hurt; but on her run to the village the natural common-sense Mrs. Colwood had detected had wrestled stoutly with her wounded feelings. Better take it with a laugh! To laugh, however, one must be distracted; and Mrs. Roughsedge, bubbling over with gossip and good-humor, was distraction personified. Stern Justice, in the person of Lord M.'s gamekeeper, had that morning brought back Diana's two dogs in leash, a pair of abject and convicted villains, from the delirium of a night's hunting. The son of Miss Bertram's coachman had only just missed an appointment under the District Council by one place on the list of candidates. A " Red Van" bursting with Socialist literature had that morning taken up its place on the village green; and Diana's poor housemaid, in payment for a lifetime's neglect, must now lose every tooth in her head, according to the verdict of the local dentist, an excellent young man, in Mrs. Rough- The Testing of Diana Mallory sedge's opinon, but ready to give you almost too much pulling out for your money. On all these topics she over- flowed with much fun and unfailing good-humor. So that after half an hour spent with Mrs. Roughsedge and Hugh in the little drawing-room at the White Cottage, Diana's aspect was very different from what it had been when she arrived. Hugh, however, had noticed her pallor and depression. He was obstinately certain that Oliver Marsham was not the man to make such a girl happy. Between the rich Radical member and the young officer poor, slow of speech and wits, and passionately devoted to the old- fashioned ideals and traditions in which he had been brought up there was a natural antagonism. But Roughsedge 's contempt for his brilliant and successful neighbor on the ground of selfish ambitions and un- patriotic trucklings was, in truth, much more active than anything Marsham had ever shown or felt toward himself. For in the young soldier there slept potentialities of feeling and of action, of which neither he nor others were as yet aware. Nevertheless, he faced the facts. He remembered the look with which Diana had returned to the Beechcote drawing-room, where Marsham awaited her, the day before and told himself not to be a fool. Meanwhile he had found an opportunity in which to tell her, unheard by his parents, that he was practically certain of his Nigerian appointment, and must that night break it to his father and mother. And Diana had listened like a sister, all sympathy and kind looks, prom- ising in the young man's ear, as he said good-bye at the garden gate, that she would come again next day to cheer his mother up. 152 The Testing of Diana Mallorg He stood looking after her as she walked away; his hands in his pockets, a flush on his handsome face. How her coming had glorified and transformed the place! No womanish nonsense, too, about this going of his! though she knew well that it meant fighting. Only a kindling of the eyes a few questions as practical as they were eager and then that fluttering of the soft breath which he had noticed as she bent over his mother. But she was not for him! Thus it is that women the noblest and the dearest throw themselves away. She, with all the right and proper feelings of an English- woman, to mate with this plausible Radical and Little Englander! Hugh kicked the stones of the gravel savagely to right and left as he walked back to the house in a black temper with his poverty and Diana's foolishness. But was she really in love ? " Why then so pale, fond lover?" He found a kind of angry comfort in the re- membrance of her drooping looks. They were no credit to Mar sham, anyway. Meanwhile Diana walked home, lingering by the way in two or three cottages. She was shyly beginning to make friends with the people. An old road-mender kept her listening while he told her how a Tallyn keeper had peppered him in the eye, ten years before, as he was crossing Barrow Common at dusk. One eye had been taken out, and the other was almost useless; there he sat, blind, and cheerfully telling the tale "Muster Marsham Muster Henry Marsham had been verra kind ten shillin' a week, and an odd job now and then. I do suffer terr'ble, miss, at times but ther's noa good in grumblin' is there?" Next door, in a straggling line of cottages, she found " 153 The Testing of Diana Mallorg a gentle, chattering widow whose husband had been drowned in the brew-house at Beechcote twenty years before, drowned in the big vat! before any one had heard a cry or a sound. The widow was proud of so exceptional a tragedy ; eager to tell the tale. How had she lived since ? Oh, a bit here and a bit there. And, of late, half a crown from the parish. Last of all, in a cottage midway between the village and Beechcote, she paused to see a jolly middle-aged woman, with a humorous eye and a stream of conversa- tion held prisoner by an incurable disease. She was absolutely alone in the world. Nobody knew what she had to live on. But she could always find a crust for some one more destitute than herself, and she ranked high among the wits of the village. To Diana she talked of her predecessors the Vavasours whose feudal pres- ence seemed to be still brooding over the village. With little chuckles of laughter, she gave instance after instance of the tyranny with which they had lorded it over the country-side in early Victorian days: how the " Madam Vavasour" of those days had pulled the feathers from the village-girls' hats, and turned a family who had offended her, with all their belongings, out into the village street. But when Diana rejoiced that such days were done, the old woman gave a tolerant: "Noa noa! They were none so bad were t' Vavasours. Only they war no good at heirin." "Airing?" said Diana, mystified. " Heirin," repeated Betty Dyson, emphatically. " Theer was old Squire Henry wi' noabody to follow 'im an' Mr. Edward noa better and now thissun, wi nobbut lasses. Noa they war noa good at heirin moor's t' pity." Then she looked slyly at her companion: "An' The Testing of Diana Mallorg yo', miss? yo'll be gettin' married one o' these days, I'll uphowd yer." Diana colored and laughed. "Ay," said the old woman, laughing too, with the merriment of a girl. " Sweethearts is noa good but you mun ha' a sweetheart!" Diana fled, pursued by Betty's raillery, and then by the thought of this lonely laughing woman, often tor- mented by pain, standing on the brink of ugly death, and yet turning back to look with this merry indulgent eye upon the past; and on this dingy old world, in which she had played so ragged and limping a part. * Yet clearly she would play it again if she could so sweet is mere life ! and so hard to silence in the breast! Diana walked quickly through the woods, the prey of one of those vague storms of feeling which test and stretch the soul of youth. To what horrors had she been listening ? the suffering of the blinded road-mender the grotesque and hideous death of the young laborer in his full strength the griefs of a childless and penniless old woman ? Yet life had somehow engulfed the horrors; and had spread its quiet waves above them, under a pale, late-born sun- shine. The stoicism of the poor rebuked her, as she thought of the sharp impatience and disappointment in which she had parted from Mrs. Colwood. She seemed to hear her father's voice. " No shirking, Diana! You asked her you formed absurd and exag- gerated expectations. She is here; and she is not re- sponsible for your expectations. Make the best of her, and do your duty!" And eagerly the child's heart answered : " Yes, yes, papa! dear papal" The Testing of Diana Mallorij And there, sharp in color and line, it rose on the breast of memory, the beloved face. It set pulses beat- ing in Diana which from her childhood onward had been a life within her life, a pain answering to pain, the child's inevitable response to the father's misery, always discerned, never understood. This abiding remembrance of a dumb unmitigable grief beside which she had grown up, of which she had never known the secret, was indeed one of the main factors in Diana's personality. Muriel Colwood had at once perceived it; Marsham had been sometimes puzzled by the signs of it. To-day because of Fanny and this toppling of her dreams the dark mood, to which Diana was always liable, had descended heavily upon her. She had no sooner rebuked it by the example of the poor, or the remembrance of her father's long patience than she was torn by questions, vehement, insistent, full of a new anguish. Why had her father been so unhappy? What was the meaning of that cloud under which she had grown up? She had repeated to Muriel Colwood the stock expla- nations she had been accustomed to give herself of the manner and circumstances of her bringing-up. To-day they seemed to her own mind, for the first time, utterly insufficient. In a sudden crash and confusion of feeling it was as though she were tearing open the heart of the past, passionately probing and searching. Certain looks and phrases of Fanny Merton were really working in her memory. They were so light yet so ugly. They suggested something, but so vaguely that Diana could find no words for it : a note of desecration, 156 The Testing of Diana Mallory of cheapening a breath of dishonor. It was as though a mourner, shut in for years with sacred memories, be- came suddenly aware that all the time, in a sordid world outside, these very memories had been the sport of an unkind and insolent chatter that besmirched them. Her mother! In the silence of the wood the girl's slender figure stiffened itself against an attacking thought. In her inmost mind she knew well that it was from her mother and her mother's death that all the strangeness of the past descended. But yet the death and grief she remembered had never presented themselves to her as they appear to other bereaved ones. Why had nobody ever spoken to her of her mother in her childhood and youth? neither father, nor nurses, nor her old French governess ? Why had she no picture no relics no let- ters? In the box of " Sparling Papers" there was noth- ing that related to Mrs. Sparling; that she knew, for her father had abruptly told her so not long before his death. They were old family records which he could not bear to destroy the honorable records of an upright race, which some day, he thought, "might be a pleasure to her." Often during the last six months of his life, it seemed to her now, in this intensity of memory, that he had been on the point of breaking the silence of a lifetime. She recalled moments and looks of agonized effort and yearn- ing. But he died of a growth in the throat ; and for weeks before the end speech was forbidden them, on account of the constant danger of hemorrhage. So that Diana had always felt herself starved of those last words and mes- sages which make the treasure of bereaved love. Often and often the cry of her loneliness to her dead father had The Testing of Diana Mallory been the bitter cry of Andromache to Hector : "I had from thee, in dying, no memorable word on which I might ever think in the year of mourning while I wept for thee." Had there been a quarrel between her father and mother ? or something worse ? at which Diana's igno- rance of life, imposed upon her by her upbringing, could only glance in shuddering? She knew her mother had died at twenty-six; and that in the two years before her death Mr. Mallory had been much away, travelling and exploring in Asia Minor. The young wife must have been often alone. Diana, with a sudden catching of the breath, envisaged possibilities of which no rational being of full age who reads a newspaper can be unaware. Then, with an inward passion of denial, she shook the whole nightmare from her. Outrage! treason! to those helpless memories of which she was now the only guardian. In these easy, forgetting days, when the old passions and endurances look to us either affected or eccentric, such a life, such an exile as her father's, may seem strange even so she accused herself to that father's child. But that is because we are mean souls beside those who begot us. We cannot feel as they; and our constancy, compared to theirs, ie fickleness. So, in spirit, she knelt again beside her dead, em- bracing their cold feet and asking pardon. The tears clouded her eyes; she wandered blindly on through the wood till she was conscious of sudden light and space. She had come to a clearing, where several huge beeches had been torn up by a storm some years before. Their place had been filled by a tangle of many saplings, and in their midst rose an elder-bush, already showing leaf, amid the bare winterly wood. The last 158 The Testing of Diana Mallory western light caught the twinkling leaf buds, and made of the tree a Burning Bush, first herald of the spring. The sight of it unloosed some swell of passion in Diana; she found herself smiling amid her tears, and saying incoherent things that only the wood caught. To-day was the meeting of Parliament. She pictured the scene. Marsham was there, full of projects and ambitions. Innocently, exultantly, she reminded her- self how much she knew of them. If he could not have her sympathy, he must have her antagonism. But no chilling exclusions and reserves! Rather, a generous confidence on his side; and a gradual, a child-like melting and kindling on hers. In politics she would never agree with him never! she would fight him with all her breath and strength. But not with the methods of Mrs. Fotheringham. No! what have politics to do with with She dropped her face in her hands, laughing to herself, the delicious tremors of first love running through her. Would she hear from him ? She understood she was to be written to, though she had never asked it. But ought she to allow it? Was it convenable? She knew that girls now did what they liked threw all the old rules overboard. But proudly she stood by the old rules; she would do nothing "fast" or forward. Yet she was an orphan standing alone; surely for her there might be more freedom than for others? She hurried home. With the rush of new happiness had come back the old pity, the old yearning. It wasn't, wasn't Fanny's fault! She Diana had always under- stood that Mr. Merton was a vulgar, grasping man of no breeding who had somehow entrapped " your aunt Bertha who was very foolish and very young" into a 159 \ The Testing of Diana Mallorg most undesirable marriage. As for Mrs. Merton Aunt Bertha Fanny had with her many photographs, among them several of her mother. A weak, heavy face, rather pretty still. Diana had sought her own mother in it, with a passionate yet shrinking curiosity, only to pro- voke a rather curt reply from Fanny, in answer to a question she had, with difficulty, brought herself to put: " Not a bit ! There wasn't a scrap of likeness between mother and Aunt Sparling." The evening passed off better than the morning had done. Eyes more acute in her own interests than Diana's might have perceived a change in Fanny Merton, after her long conversation with Mrs. Colwood. A certain excitement, a certain triumph, perhaps an occasional relenting and compunction: all these might have been observed or guessed. She made herself quite amiable: showed more photographs, talked still more frankly of her card-winnings on the steamer, and of the flirtation which had beguiled the voyage; bespoke the immediate services of Diana's maid for a dress that must be done up; and expressed a desire for another and a bigger wardrobe in her room. Gradually a tone of possession, almost of command, crept in. Diana, astonished and amused, made no resistance. These, she supposed, were West -Indian manners. The Colonies are like healthy children that submit in their youth, and then grow up and order the household about. What matter! Meanwhile Mrs. Colwood looked a little pale, and con- fessed to a headache. Diana was pleased, however, to see that she and Fanny were getting on better than had seemed to be probable in the morning. Fanny wished 1 60 The Testing of Diana Mallory nay, was resolved to be entertained and amused. Mrs. Colwood threw herself with new zest into the various plans Diana had made for her cousin. There was to be a luncheon-party, an afternoon tea, and so forth. Only Diana, pricked by a new mistrust, said nothing in public about an engagement she had (to spend a Saturday- to-Monday with Lady Lucy at Tallyn three weeks later) , though she and Muriel made anxious plans as to what could be done to amuse Fanny during the two days. Diana was alone in her room at night when Mrs. Colwood knocked. Would Diana give her some laven- der-water ? her headache was still severe. Diana flew to minister to her; but, once admitted, Muriel said no more of her headache. Rather she began to soothe and caress Diana. Was she in better spirits ? Let her only intrust the entertaining of Fanny Merton to her friend and companion Mrs. Colwood would see to it. Diana laughed, and silenced her with a kiss. Presently they were sitting by the fire, Muriel Colwood in a large arm-chair, a frail, fair creature, with her large dark-circled eyes, and her thin hands and arms; Diana kneeling beside her. " I had no idea what a poison poverty could be!" said Muriel, abruptly, with her gaze on the fire. " My cousin ?" Diana looked up startled. " Was that what she was saying to you?" Muriel nodded assent. Her look so anxious and tender held, enveloped her companion. "Are they in debt?" said Diana, slowly. "Terribly. They seem to be going to break up their home." "Did she tell you all about it?" Mrs. Colwood hesitated. 161 The Testing of Diana Mallory "A great deal more than I wanted to know!" she said, at last, as though the words broke from her. Diana thought a little. " I wonder whether that was what she came home for?" Mrs. Colwood moved uneasily. " I suppose if you are in those straits you don't really think of anything else though you may wish to." " Did she tell you how much they want?" said Diana, quickly. " She named a thousand pounds!" Muriel might have been describing her own embarrass- ments, so scarlet had she become. "A thousand pounds!" cried Diana, in amazement. " But then why why does she have so many frocks and play cards for money and bet on races?" She threw her arms round Mrs. Colwood's knees im- petuously. Muriel's small hand smoothed back the girl's hair, timidly yet eagerly. " I suppose that's the way they've been brought up." "A thousand pounds! And does she expect me to provide it?" "I am afraid she hopes it." "But I haven't got it!" cried Diana, sitting down on the floor. " I've spent more than I ought on this place; I'm overdrawn; I ought to be economical for a long time. You know, Muriel, I'm not really rich." Mrs. Colwood colored deeper than ever. But ap- parently she could think of nothing to say. Her eyes were riveted on her companion. "No, I'm not rich," resumed Diana, with a frown, drawing circles on the ground with her finger. " Perhaps 162 The Testing of Diana Mallory I oughtn't to have taken this house. I dare say it was horrid of me. But I couldn't have known could I? that Fanny would be coming and want a thousand pounds?" She looked up expecting sympathy perhaps a little indignation. Mrs. Colwood only said: " I suppose she would not have come over if things had not been very bad." " Why didn't she give me some warning ?" cried Diana "instead of talking about French lessons! But am I bound do you think I am bound ? to give the MertOns a thousand pounds? I know papa got tired of giving them money. I wonder if it's right!" She frowned. Her voice was a little stern. Her eyes flashed. Mrs. Colwood again touched her hair with a hand that trembled. "They are your only relations, aren't they?" she said, pleadingly. " Yes," said Diana, still with the same roused look. "Perhaps it would set them on their feet altogether." The girl gave a puzzled laugh. "Did she Muriel, did she ask you to tell me?" " I think she wanted me to break it to you," said Mrs. Colwood, after a moment. " And I thought it it might save you pain." "Just like you!" Diana stooped to kiss her hand. "That's what your headache meant! Well, but now ought I ought I to do it?" She clasped her hands round her knees and swayed backward and forward pondering with a rather som- bre brow. Mrs. Colwood' s expression was hidden in the darkness of the big chair. The Testing of Diana Mallory " Always supposing I can do it," resumed Diana. " And I certainly couldn't do it at once ; I haven't got it. I should have to sell something, or borrow from the bank. No, I must think I must think over it," she added more resolutely, as though her way cleared. "Of course," said Mrs. Colwood, faintly. Then she raised herself. " Let me tell her so let me save you the conversation." "You dear! but why should you!" said Diana, in amazement. " Let me." "If you like! But I can't have Fanny making you look like this. Please, please go to bed." An hour later Mrs. Colwood, in her room, was still up and dressed, hanging motionless, and deep in thought, over the dying fire. And before she went to sleep fat in the small hours her pillow was wet with crying. CHAPTER VIII I THOUGHT I'd perhaps better let you know I'm well, I'm going to have a talk with Diana this morning!" The voice was determined. Muriel Colwood startled and dismayed surveyed the speaker. She had been waylaid on the threshold of her room. The morning was half-way through. Visitors, including Mr. Fred Birch, were expected to lunch, and Miss Merton, who had been lately invisible, had already, she saw, changed her dress. At breakfast, it seemed to Mrs. Colwood, she had been barely presentable : untidy hair, a dress with various hooks missing, and ruffles much in need of washing. Muriel could only suppose that the carelessness of her attire was meant to mark the completeness of her con- quest of Beechcote. But now her gown of scarlet velveteen, her arms bare to the elbow, her frizzled and curled hair, the powder which gave a bluish white to her complexion, the bangles and beads which adorned her, showed her armed to the last pin for the encounters of the luncheon-table. Mrs. Colwood, however, after a first dazzled look at what she wore, thought only of what she said. She hurriedly drew the girl into her own room, and shut the door. When, after some conversation, Fanny emerged, Mrs. Colwood was left in a state of agitation that was partly fear, partly helpless indignation. During the 165 The Testing of Diana Mallorij fortnight since Miss Merton's arrival all the energies of the house had been devoted to her amusement. A little whirlwind of dissipation had blown through the days. Two meets, a hockey-match, a concert at the neighbor- ing town, a dinner-party and various "drums," besides a luncheon-party and afternoon tea at Beechcote itself in honor of the guest Mrs. Colwood thought the girl might have been content ! But she had examined every- thing presented to her with a very critical eye, and all through it had been plain that she was impatient and dissatisfied; for, inevitably, her social success was not great. Diana, on the other hand, was still a new sen- sation, and something of a queen wherever she went. Her welcoming eyes, her impetuous smile drew a natural homage; and Fanny followed sulkily in her wake, ac- cepted not without surprise as Miss Mallory's kins- woman, but distinguished by no special attentions. In any case, she would have rebelled against the situ- ation. Her vanity was amazing, her temper violent. At home she had been treated as a beauty, and had ruled the family with a firm view to her own interests. What in Alicia Drake was disguised by a thousand subleties of class and training was here seen in its crudest form. But there was more besides miserably plain now to this trembling spectator. 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. Some- times she hoped that Diana's personality had made an 166 The Testing of Diana Mallory impression on this sinister guest; she traced a grudging consciousness in Fanny of her cousin's generosity and charm. But this perception only led to fresh despond- ency. Whenever Fanny softened, it showed itself in a claim to intimacy, as sudden and as violent as her ill- temper. She must be Diana's first and dearest be admitted to all Diana's secrets and friendships. Then on Diana's side, inevitable withdrawal, shrinking, self- defence and on Fanny's a hotter and more acrid jealousy. Meanwhile, as Mrs. Colwood knew, Diana had been engaged in correspondence with her solicitors, who had been giving her some prudent and rather stringent advice on the subject of income and expenditure. This morning, so Mrs. Colwood believed, a letter had arrived. Presently she stole out of her room to the head of the stairs. There she remained, pale and irresolute, for a little while, listening to the sounds in the house. But the striking of the hall clock, the sighing of a stormy wind round the house, and, occasionally, a sound of talking in the drawing-room, was all she heard. Diana had been busy in the hanging of some last pictures in the drawing-room photographs from Italian pictures and monuments. They had belonged to her father, and had been the dear companions of her child- hood. Each, as she handled it, breathed its own mem- ory; of the little villa on the Portofino road, with its green shutters, and rooms closed against the sun; or of the two short visits to Lucca and Florence she had made with her father. Among the photographs was one of the "Annuncia- tion" by Donatello, which glorifies the southern wall of 167 The Testing of Diana Mallorg Santa Croce. Diana had just hung it in a panelled cor- ner, where its silvery brilliance on dark wood made a point of pleasure for the eye. She lingered before it, wondering whether it would please him when he came. Unconsciously her life had slipped into this habit of re- ferring all its pains and pleasures to the unseen friend holding with him that constant dialogue of the heart without which love neither begins nor grows. Yet she no longer dreamed of discussing Fanny, and the perplexities Fanny had let loose on Beechcote, with the living Marsham. Money affairs must be kept to one's self; and somehow Fanny's visit had become neither more nor less than a money affair. That morning Diana had received a letter from old Mr. Riley, the head of the firm of Riley & Bonner a letter which was almost a lecture. If the case were indeed urgent, said Mr. Riley, if the money must be found, she could, of course, borrow on her securities, and the firm would arrange it for her. But Mr. Riley, excusing himself as her father's old friend, wrote with his own hand to beg her to consider the matter further. Her expenses had lately been many, and some of her property might possibly decline in value during the next few years. A prudent management of her affairs was really essential. Could not the money be gradually saved out of income ? Diana colored uncomfortably as she thought of the letter. What did the dear old man suppose she wanted the money for ? It hurt her pride that she must appear in this spendthrift light to eyes so honest and scru- pulous. But what could she do? Fanny poured out ugly reports of her mother's financial necessities to Muriel 168 The Testing of Diana Mallorg Colwood; Mrs. Colwood repeated them to Diana. And the Mertons were Diana's only kinsfolk. The claim of blood pressed her hard. Meanwhile, with a shrinking distaste, she had tried to avoid the personal discussion of the matter with Fanny. The task of curbing the girl's impatience, day after day, had fallen to Mrs. Colwood. Diana was still standing in a reverie before the " An- nunciation" when the drawing-room door opened. As she looked round her, she drew herself sharply together with the movement of a sudden and instinctive an- tipathy. "That's all right," said Fanny Merton, surveying the room with satisfaction, and closing the door behind her. " I thought I'd find you alone." Diana remained nervously standing before the picture, awaiting her cousin, her eyes wider than usual, one hand at her throat. "Look here," said Fanny, approaching her, "I want to talk to you." Diana braced herself. " All right." She threw a look at the clock. " Just give me time to get tidy before lunch." "Oh, there's an hour time enough!" Diana drew forward an arm-chair for Fanny, and settled herself into the corner of a sofa. Her dog jumped up beside her, and laid his nose on her lap. Fanny held herself straight. Her color under the pow- der had heightened a little. The two girls confronted each other, and, vaguely, perhaps, each felt the strange- ness of the situation. Fanny was twenty, Diana twenty- three. They were of an age when girls are generally under the guidance or authority of their elders; com- ia 169 The Testing of Diana Mallory paratively little accustomed, in the normal family, to discuss affairs or take independent decisions. Yet here they met, alone and untrammelled; as hostess and guest in the first place; as kinswomen, yet comparative stran- gers to each other, and conscious of a secret dislike, each for the other. On the one side, an exultant and partly cruel consciousness of power; on the other, feelings of repugnance and revolt, only held in check by the forces of a tender and scrupulous nature. Fanny cleared her throat. "Well, of course, Mrs. Colwood's told me all you've been saying to her. And I don't say I'm surprised." Diana opened her large eyes. "Surprised at what?" ' "Surprised well! surprised you didn't see your way all at once, and that kind of thing. I know I'd want to ask*a lot of questions shouldn't I, just! Why, that's what I expected. But, you see, my time in England's getting on. I've nothing to say to my people, and they bother my life out every mail." "What did you really come to England for?" said Diana, in a low voice. Her attitude, curled up among the cushions of the sofa, gave her an almost childish air. Fanny, on the other hand, resplendent in her scarlet dress and high coiffure, might have been years older than her cousin. And any stranger watching the face in which the hardness of an " old campaigner" already strove with youth, would have thought her, and not Diana, the mistress of the house. At Diana's question, Fanny's eyes flickered a moment. " Oh, well, I had lots of things in my mind. But it was the money that mattered most." "I see," murmured Diana. 170 The Testing of Diana Mallory Fanny fidgeted a little with one of the three bead neck- laces which adorned her. Then she broke out: "Look here, Diana, you've never been poor in your life, so you don't know what it's like being awfully hard up. But ever since father died, mother's had a frightful lot of trouble all of us to keep, and the boys' schooling to pay, and next to nothing to do it on. Father left everything in a dreadful muddle. He never had a bit of sense " Diana made a sudden movement. Fanny looked at her astonished, expecting her to speak. Diana, however, said nothing, and the girl resumed: /'I mean, in business. He'd got everything into a shocking state, and instead of six hundred a year for us as we'd always been led on to expect well, there wasn't three! Then, you know, Uncle Mallory used to send us money. Well" (she cleared her throat again and looked away from Diana) , " about a year before he died he and father fell out about something so that didn't come in any more. Then we thought perhaps he'd remember us in his will. And that was another disap- pointment. So, you see, really mother didn't know where to turn." " I suppose papa thought he had done all he could," said Diana, in a voice which tried to keep quite steady. " He never denied any claim he felt just. I feel I must say that, because you seem to blame papa. But, of course, I am very sorry for Aunt Bertha." At the words "claim" and "just" there was a quick change of expression in Fanny's eyes. She broke out angrily: "Well, you really don't know about it, Diana, so it's no good talking. And I'm not going to rake up old things " 171 The Testing of Diana Mallory "But if I don't know," said Diana, interrupting, " hadn't you better tell me ? Why did papa and Uncle Merton disagree? And why did you think papa ought to have left you money ?" She bent forward insistently. There was a dignity perhaps also a touch of haughti- ness in her bearing which exasperated the girl beside her. The haughtiness was that of one who protects the dead. But Fanny's mind was not one that perceived the finer shades. "Well, I'm not going to say!" said Fanny, with vehe- mence. "But I can tell you, mother has a claim! and Uncle Mallory ought to have left us something!" The instant the words were out she regretted them. Diana abandoned her childish attitude. She drew herself together, and sat upright on the edge of the sofa. The color had come flooding back hotly into her cheeks, and the slightly frowning look produced by the effort to see the face before her distinctly gave a peculiar intensity to the eyes. "Fanny, please! you must tell me why!" The tone, resolute, yet appealing, put Fanny in an evident embarrassment. " Well, I can't," she said, after a moment " so it's no good asking me." Then suddenly, she hesitated " or at least " "At least what? Please go on." Fanny wriggled again, then said, with a burst: " Well, my mother was Aunt Sparling's younger sister you know thatdon't you? " "Of course." " And our grandfather died a year before Aunt Spar- ling. She was mother's trustee. Oh, the money's all right the trust money, I mean," said the girl, hastily. 172 The Testing of Diana Mallorg "But it was a lot of other things that mother says grandpapa always meant to divide between her and Aunt Sparling and she never had them nor a farthing out of them!" "What other things? I don't understand." "Jewels! there! jewels and a lot of plate. Mother says she had a right to half the things that belonged to her mother. Grandpapa always told her she should have them. And there wasn't a word about them in the will." "7 haven't any diamonds," said Diana, quietly, "or any jewels at all, except a string of pearls papa gave me when I was nineteen, and two or three little things we bought in Florence." Fanny Merton grew still redder; she stared aggres- sively at her cousin : " Well that was because Aunt Sparling sold all the things!" Diana started and recoiled. " You mean," she said her breath fluttering " that mamma sold things she had no right to and never gave Aunt Bertha the money!" The restrained passion of her look had an odd effect upon her companion. Fanny first wavered under it, then laughed a laugh that was partly perplexity, partly something else, indecipherable. "Well, as I wasn't born then, I don't know. You needn't be cross with me, Diana; I didn't mean to say any harm of anybody. But mother says" she laid an obstinate stress on each word " that she remembers quite well grandpapa meant her to have : a diamond necklace; a riviere" (she began to check the items off on her fingers) " there were two, and of course Aunt 173 The Testing of Diana Mallory Sparling had the best; two bracelets, one with tur- quoises and one with pearls; a diamond brooch; an opal pendant; a little watch set with diamonds, grand- ma used to wear ; and then a lot of plate ! Mother wrote me out a list I've got it here." She opened a beaded bag on her wrist, took out half a sheet of paper, and handed it to Diana. Diana looked at it in silence. Even her lips were white, and her fingers shook. "Did you ever send this to papa?" she asked, after a minute. Fanny fidgeted again. "Yes." "And what did he say? Have you got his letter?" "No; I haven't got his letter." "Did he admit that that mamma had done this?" Fanny hesitated; but her intelligence, which was of a simple kind, did not suggest to her an ingenious line of reply. " Well, I dare say he didn't. But that doesn't make any difference." "Was that what he and Uncle Merton quarrelled about?" Fanny hesitated again: then broke out : " Father only did what he ought he asked for what was owed mother!" " And papa wouldn't give it!" cried Diana, in a strange note of scorn ; " papa, who never could rest if he owed a farthing to anybody who always overpaid everybody whom everybody " She rose suddenly with a bitten lip. Her eyes blazed and her cheeks. She walked to the window and stood looking out, in a whirlwind of feeling and memory, hiding '74 The Testing of Diana Mallory her face as best she could from the girl who sat watching her with an expression half sulky, half insolent. Diana was thinking of moments recalling forgotten fragments of dialogue in the past, which showed her father's opin- ion of his Barbadoes brother-in-law: "A grasping, ill- bred fellow" " neither gratitude, nor delicacy" "has been the evil genius of his wife, and will be the ruin of his children." She did not believe a word of Fanny's story not a word of it! She turned impetuously. Then, as her eyes met Fanny's, a shock ran through her the same sudden, in- explicable fear which had seized on Mrs. Colwood, only more sickening, more paralyzing. And it was a fear which ran back to and linked itself with the hour of heart-searching in the wood. What was Fanny thinking of? what was in her mind on her lips? Impulses she could not have defined, terrors to which she could give no name, crept over Diana's will and disabled it. She trembled from head to foot and gave way. She walked up to her cousin. "Fanny, is there any letter anything of grand- papa's or of my mother's that you could show me?" "No! It was a promise, I tell you there was no writing. But my mother could swear to it." The girl faced her cousin without flinching. Diana sat down again, white and tremulous, the moment of energy, of resistance, gone. In a wavering voice she began to explain that she had, in fact, been inquiring into her affairs, that the money was not actually at her dis- posal, that to provide it would require an arrangement with her bankers, and the depositing of some securities; but that, before long, it should be available. Fanny drew a long breath. She had not expected the 175 The Testing of Diana Mallory surrender. Her eyes sparkled, and she began to stammer thanks. "Don't!" said Diana, putting out a hand. "If I owe it you and I take it on your word the money shall be paid that's all. Only only, I wish you had not written to me like that; and I ask that that you will never, please, speak to me about it again!" She had risen, and was standing, very tall and rigid, her hands pressing against each other. Fanny's face clouded. "Very well," she said, as she rose from her seat, " I'm sure I don't want to talk about it. I didn't like the job a bit nor did mother. But if you are poor -and somebody owes you something you can't help trying to get it that's all!" Diana said nothing. She went to the writing-table and began to arrange some letters. Fanny looked at her. "I say, Diana! perhaps you won't want me to stay here after You seem to have taken against me." Diana turned. "No," she said, faintly. Then, with a little sob: "I thought of nothing but your coming." Fanny flushed. " Well, of course you've been very kind to me and all that sort of thing. I wasn't saying you hadn't been. Except Well, no, there's one thing I do think you've been rather nasty about!" The girl threw back her head defiantly. Diana's pale face questioned her. " I was talking to your maid yesterday," said Fanny, slowly, " and she says you're going to stay at some smart place next week, and you've been getting a new dress for 176 The Testing of Diana Mallory it. And you've never said a word to me about it let alone ask me to go with you!" Diana looked at her amazed. "You mean I'm going to Tallyn!" "That's it," said Fanny, reproachfully. "And you know I don't get a lot of fun at home and I might as well be seeing people and going about with you though I do have to play second fiddle. You're rich, of course everybody's nice to you " She paused. Diana, struck dumb, could find, for the moment, nothing to say. The red flamed in Fanny's cheeks, and she turned away with a flounce. " Oh, well, you'd better say it at once you're ashamed of me! I haven't had your blessed advantages! Do you think I don't know that!" In the girl's heightened voice and frowning brow there was a touch of fury, of goaded pride, that touched Diana with a sudden remorse. She ran toward her cousin appealing : " I'm very sorry, Fanny. I I don't like to leave you but they are my great friends and Lady Lucy, though she's very kind, is very old-fashioned. One couldn't take the smallest liberty with her. I don't think I could ask to take you when they are quite by themselves and the house is only half mounted. But Mrs. Col wood and I had been thinking of several things that might amuse you and I shall only be two nights away." "I don't want any amusing thanks!" said Fanny, walking to the door. She closed it behind her. Diana clasped her hands overhead in a gesture of amazement. "To quarrel with me about that after the other thing 1" 177 The Testing of Diana Mallory No! not Tallyn! not Tallyn! anywhere, anything, but that! Was she proud? snobbish? Her eyes filled with tears, but her will hardened. What was to be gained? Fanny would not like them, nor they her. The luncheon-party had been arranged for Mr. Birch, Fanny's train acquaintance. Diana had asked the Rough- sedges, explaining the matter, with a half-deprecating, half -humorous face, to the comfortable ear of Mrs. Roughsedge. Explanation was necessary, for this par- ticular young man was only welcome in those houses of the neighborhood which were not socially dainty. Mrs. Roughsedge understood at once laughed heartily ac- cepted with equal heartiness and then, taking Diana's hand, she said, with a shining of her gray eye: " My dear, if you want Henry and me to stand on our ; heads we will attempt it with pleasure. You are an angel! and angels are not to be worried by solicitors." The first part of which remark referred to a certain morning after Hugh's announcement of his appointment to the Nigerian expedition, when Diana had shown the old people a sweet and daughter-like sympathy, which had entirely won whatever portion of their hearts re- mained still to be captured. Hugh, meanwhile, was not yet gone, though he was within a fortnight of departure. He was coming to luncheon, with his parents, in order to support Diana. The family had seen Miss Merton some two or three times, and were all strongly of opinion that Diana very much wanted supporting. " Why should one be civil to one's cousin?" Dr. Roughsedge inquired of his wife. " If they are nice, let them stand on their own merits. If 178 The Testing of Diana Nallory not, they are disagreeable people who know a deal too much about you. Miss Diana should have consulted me!" The Roughsedges arrived early, and found Diana alone in the drawing-room. Again Captain Roughsedge thought her pale, and was even sure that she had lost flesh. This time it was hardly possible to put these symptoms down to Marsham's account. He chafed un- der the thought that he should be no longer there in case a league, offensive and defensive, had in the end to be made with Mrs. Colwood for the handling of cousins. It was quite clear that Miss Fanny was a vulgar little minx, and that Beechcote would have no peace till it was rid of her. Meanwhile, the indefinable change which had come over his mother's face, during the preceding week, had escaped even the quick eyes of an affectionate son. Alas! for mothers when Lalage appears! Mr. Birch arrived to the minute, and when he was engaged in affable conversation with Diana, Fanny, last of the party the door being ceremoniously thrown open by the butler entered, with an air. Mr. Birch sprang effusively to his feet, and there was a noisy greeting be- tween him and his travelling companion. The young man was slim, and effeminately good-looking. His frock- coat and gray trousers were new and immaculate; his small feet were encased in shining patent-leather boots, and his blue eyes gave the impression of having been carefully matched with his tie. He was evidently de- lighted to find himself at Beechcote, and it might have been divined that there was a spice of malice in his pleasure. The Vavasours had always snubbed him; Miss Mallory herself had not been over-polite to him on one or two occasions; but her cousin was a "stunner," and, 179 The Testing of Diana Mallory secure in Fanny's exuberant favor, he made himself quite at home. Placed on Diana's left at table, he gave her much voluble information about her neighbors, mostly ill-natured; he spoke familiarly of "that clever chap Marsham," as of a politician who owed his election for the division entirely to the good offices of Mr. Fred Birch's firm, and described Lady Lucy as " an old dear," though very " frowsty " in her ideas. He was strongly of opinion that Marsham should find an heiress as soon as possible, for there was no saying how " long the old lady would see him out of his money," and everybody knew that at present "she kept him beastly short." "As for me," the speaker wound up, with an engaging and pensive naivetf, "I've talked to him till I'm tired." -I At last he was headed away from Tallyn and its owners, only to fall into a rapturous debate with Fanny over a racing bet which seemed to have been offered and taken on the journey which first made them acquainted. Fanny had lost, but the young man gallantly excused her. "No no, couldn't think of it! Not till next time. Then my word! I'll come down upon you won't I? Teach you to know your way about eh ?" Loud laughter from Fanny, who professed to know her way about already. They exchanged " tips " until at last Mr. Birch, lost in admiration of his companion, pronounced her a "ripper" he had never yet met a lady so well up "why, you know as much as a man!" Dr. Roughsedge meanwhile observed the type. The father, an old-fashioned steady-going solicitor, had sent the son to expensive schools, and allowed him two years at Oxford, until the College had politely requested the youth's withdrawal. The business was long established, 1 80 The Testing of Diana Mallorg and had been sound. This young man had now been a partner in it for two years, and the same period had seen the rise to eminence of another and hitherto ob- scure firm in the county town. Mr. Fred Birch spoke contemptuously of the rival firm as "smugs"; but the district was beginning to intrust its wills and mortgages to the "smugs" with a sad and increasing alacrity. There were, indeed, some secret discomforts in the young man's soul; and while he sported with Fanny he did not forget business. The tenant of Beechcote was, ipso facto, of some social importance, and Diana was re- ported to be rich; the Roughsedges also, though negligible financially, were not without influence in high places; and the doctor was governor of an important grammar- school recently revived and reorganized, wherewith the Birches would have been glad to be officially connected. He therefore made himself agreeable. "You read, sir, a great deal?" he said to the doctor, with a professional change of voice. The doctor, who, like most great men, was a trifle greedy, was silently enjoying a dish of oysters delicately rolled in bacon. He looked up at his questioner. "A great deal, Mr. Birch." "Everything, in fact?" " Everything except, of course, what is indispensable." Mr. Birch looked puzzled. " I heard of you from the Duchess, doctor. She says you are one of the most learned men in England." "The Duchess?" The doctor screwed up his eyes and looked round the table. Mr. Birch, with complacency, named the wife of a neighboring potentate who owned half the county. "Don't know her," said the doctor "don't know 181 The Testing of Diana Mallory her; and excuse the barbarity don't wish to know her." "Oh, but so charming!" cried Mr. Birch "and so kind!" The doctor shook his head, and declared that great ladies were not to his taste. " Poodles, sir, poodles! ' fed on cream and muffins!' there is no trusting them." "Poodles!" said Fanny, in astonishment. "Why are duchesses like poodles?" The doctor bowed to her. "I give it up, Miss Merton. Ask Sydney Smith." Fanny was mystified, and the sulky look appeared. "Well, I know I should like to be a duchess. Why shouldn't one want to be a duchess?" "Why not indeed?" said the doctor, helping himself to another oyster. " That's why they exist." " I suppose you're teasing," said Fanny, rather crossly. "I am quite incapable of it," protested the doctor. " Shall we not all agree that duchesses exist for the envy and jealousy of mankind ?" "Womankind?" put in Diana. The doctor smiled at her, and finished his oyster. Brave child! Had that odious young woman been behaving in character that morning? He would like to have the dealing with her! As for Diana, her face reminded him of Cowper's rose "just washed by a shower" delicately fresh yet elo- quent of some past storm. Good Heavens! Where was that fellow Marsham? Philandering with politics? when there was this flower for the gathering! Luncheon was half - way through when a rattling sound of horses' hoofs outside drew the attention of the table. tit The Testing of Diana Mallorg "Somebody else coming to lunch," said Mr. Birch. " Sorry for 'em, Miss Mallory. We haven't left 'em much. You've done us so uncommon well." Diana herself looked in some alarm round the table. "Plenty, my dear lady, plenty!" said the doctor, on her other hand. " Cold beef, and bread and cheese what does any mortal want more? Don't disturb yourself." Diana wondered who the visitors might be. The butler entered. "Sir James Chide, ma'am, and Miss Drake. They have ridden over from Overton Park, and didn't think it was so far. They told me to say they didn't wish to disturb vou at luncheon, and might they have a cup of coffee?" Diana excused herself, and hurried out. Mr. Birch explained at length to Mrs. Colwood and Fanny that Overton Park belonged to the Judge, Sir William Felton; that Sir James Chide was often there; and no doubt Miss Drake had been invited for the ball of the night before; awfully smart affair f the coming-out ball of the youngest daughter. "Who is Miss Drake?" asked Fanny, thinking en- viously of the ball, to which she had not been invited. Mr. Birch turned to her with confidential jocosity. "Lady Lucy Marsham's cousin; and it is generally supposed that she might by now have been something else but for " He nodded toward the chair at the head of the table which Diana had left vacant. " Whatever do you mean ?" said Fanny. The Marsh- ams to her were, so far, mere shadows. They repre- sented rich people on the horizon whom Diana selfishly wished to keep to herself. 183 The Testing of Diana Mallory "I'm telling tales, I declare I am!" said Mr. Birch. " Haven't you seen Mr. Oliver Marsham yet, Miss Mer- ton?" "No. I don't know anything about him." "Ah!" said Mr. Birch, smiling, and peeling an apple with deliberation. Fanny flushed. " Is there anything up between him and Diana?" she said in his ear. Mr. Birch smiled again. " I saw old Mr. Vavasour the other day clients of ours, you understand. A close-fisted old boy, Miss Mer- ton. They imagined they'd get a good deal out of your cousin. But not a bit of it. Oliver Marsham does all her business for her. The Vavasours don't like it, I can tell you." " I haven't seen either him or Lady Lucy is that her name? since I came." " Let me see. You came about a fortnight ago just when Parliament reassembled. Mr. Marsham is our mem- ber. He and Lady Lucy went up to town the day be- fore Parliament met." "And what about Miss Drake?" "Ah! poor Miss Drake!" Mr. Birch raised a humor- ous eyebrow. "Those little things will happen, won't they? It was just at Christmas, I understand, that your cousin paid her first visit to Tallyn. A man who was shooting there told me all about it." "And Miss Drake was there too?" Mr. Birch nodded. " And Diana cut her out ?" said Fanny, bending toward him eagerly. Mr. Birch smiled again. Voices were heard in the 184 The Testing of Diana Mallory hall, but before the new guests entered, the young man put up a finger to his lips : " Don't you quote me, please, Miss Merton. But, I can tell you, your cousin's very high up in the running just now. And Oliver Marsham will have twenty thousand a year some day if he has a penny. Miss Mallory hasn't told you anything hasn't she? Ha ha! Still waters, you know still waters!" A few minutes later Sir James Chide was seated be- tween Diana and Fanny Merton, Mr. Birch having obligingly vacated his seat and passed to the other side of the table, where his attempts at conversation were coldly received by Miss Drake. That young lady dazzled the eyes of Fanny, who sat opposite to her. The closely fitting habit and black riding-hat gave to her fine figure and silky wealth of hair the maximum of effect. Fanny perfectly understood that only money and fashion could attain to Miss Drake's costly simplicity. She envied her from the bottom of her heart; she would have given worlds to see the dress in which she had figured at the ball. Miss Drake, no doubt, went to two or three balls a week, and could spend anything she liked upon her clothes. Yet Diana had cut her out Diana was to carry off the prize! Twenty thousand a year! Fanny's mind was in a ferment the mind of a raw and envious pro- vincial, trained to small ambitions and hungry desires. Half an. hour before, she had been writing a letter home, in a whirl of delight and self-glorification. The money Diana had promised would set the whole family on its legs, and Fanny had stipulated that after the debts were paid she was to have a clear, cool hundred for her own 13 185 The Testing of Diana Mallory pocket, and no nonsense about it. It was she who had done it all, and if it hadn't been for her, they might all have gone to the workhouse. But now her success was to her as dross. The thought of Diana's future wealth and glory produced in her a feeling which was an acute physical distress. So Diana was to be married ! and to the great parti of the neighborhood! Fanny already saw her in the bridal white, surrounded by glittering bridesmaids; and a churchful of titled people, bowing before her as she passed in state, like poppies under a breeze. And Diana had never said a word to her about it to her own cousin! Nasty, close, mean ways! Fanny was not good enough for Tallyn oh no! She was asked to Beechcote when there was nothing going on or next to nothing and one might yawn one's self to sleep with dulness from morning till night. But as soon as she was safely packed off, then there would be fine times, no doubt ; the engagement would be announced ; the presents would begin to come in; the bridesmaids would be chosen. But she would get nothing out of it not she; she would not be asked to be bridesmaid. She was not genteel enough for Diana. Diana Diana ! the daughter Fanny's whole nature gathered itself as though for a spring upon some prey, at once tempting and exasper- ating. In one short fortnight the inbred and fated an- tagonism between the two natures had developed it- self on Fanny's side to the point of hatred. In the depths of her being she knew that Diana had yearned to love her, and had not been able. That failure was not her crime, but Diana's. Fanny looked haughtily round the table. How many 186 The Testing of Diana Mallory of them knew what she knew? Suddenly a name re- curred to her! the name announced by the butler and repeated by Mr. Birch. At the moment she had been thinking of other things; it had roused no sleeping as- sociations. But now the obscure under-self sent it echo- ing through the brain. Fanny caught her breath. The sudden excitement made her head swim. She turned and looked at the white-haired elderly man sitting be- tween her and Diana. Sir James Chide! (.Memories of the common gossip in her home, of the talk of the people on the steamer, of pages in that volume of Famous Trials she had studied on the voyage with such a close and unsavory curiosity danced through the girl's consciousness. Well, he Iqiew! No good pre- tending there. 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 con- tempt. Yet so bewildered was she that when Sir James ad- dressed 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. Vulgarity, conceit, ill-breeding the great lawyer detected them in five minutes' conversation. Nor were they unexpected; for he was well acquainted with Miss Fanny's origins. Yet the perception of them made the situation still more painfully interesting to him, and no less mysterious than before. For he saw no substantial change in it; and he was, in truth, no less perplexed than Fanny. If certain things had happened in consequence of Miss Merton's advent, neither he nor any other guest would be sitting at Diana Mallory's table 187 The Testing of Diana Mallory that day; of that he was morally certain. Therefore, they had not happened. He returned with a redoubled tenderness of feeling to his conversation with Diana. He had come to Over- ton for the Sunday, at great professional inconvenience, for nothing in the world but that he must pay this visit to Beechcote; and he had approached the house with dread dread lest he should find a face stricken with the truth. That dread was momentarily lifted, for in those beautiful dark eyes of Diana innocence and ignorance were still written; but none the less he trembled for her; he saw her as he had seen her at Tallyn, a creature doomed, and consecrate to pain. Why, in the name of justice and pity, had her father done this thing? So it is that a man's love, for lack of a little simple courage and common-sense, turns to cruelty. Poor, poor child! At first sight he, like the Rough- sedges, had thought her pale and depressed. Then he had given his message. "Marsham has arrived! turned up at Overton a couple of hours ago and told us to say he would follow us here after luncheon. He wired to Lady Felton this morning to ask if she would take him in for the Sunday. Some big political meeting he had for to- night is off. Lady Lucy stays in town and Tallyn is shut up. But Lady Felton was, of course, delighted to get him. He arrived about noon. Civility to his hostess kept him to luncheon then he pursues us!" Since then! no lack of sparkle in the eyes or color in the cheek! Yet even so, to Sir James's keen sense, there was an increase, a sharpening, in Diana's person- ality, of the wistful, appealing note, which had been al- ways touching, always perceptible, even through the radiant days of her Tallyn visit. 188 The Testing of Diana Mallory Ah, well! like Dr. Roughsedge, only with a far deeper urgency, he, too, 'for want of any better plan, invoked the coming lover. In God's name, let Marsham take the thing into his own hands! stand on his own feet! dissipate a nightmare which ought never to have arisen and gather the girl to his heart. Meanwhile Fanny's attention and the surging anger of her thoughts were more and more directed upon the girl with the fair hair opposite. A natural bond of sym- pathy seemed somehow to have arisen between her and this Miss Drake Diana's victim. Alicia Drake, look- ing up, was astonished, time after time, to find herself stared at by the common-looking young woman across the table, who was, she understood, Miss Mallory's cousin. What dress, and what manners! One did not often meet that kind of person in society. She wished Oliver joy of his future relations. In the old panelled drawing-room the coffee was cir- culating. Sir James was making friends with Mrs. Col- wood, whose gentle looks and widow's dress appealed to him. Fanny, Miss Drake, and Mr. Birch made a group by the fireplace; Mr. Birch was posing as an authority on the drama; Fanny, her dark eyes fixed upon Alicia, was not paying much attention; and Alicia, with ill-con- cealed impatience, was yawning behind her glove. Hugh Roughsedge was examining the Donatello photograph. "Do you like it?" said Diana, standing beside him. She was conscious of having rather neglected him at lunch, and there was a dancing something in her own heart which impelled her to kindness and compunction. Was not the good, inarticulate youth, too, going out into 189 The Testing of Diana Mallory the wilds, his life in his hands, in the typical English way ? The soft look in her eyes which expressed this mingled feeling did not mislead the recipient. < v He had overheard Sir James Chide's message ; he understood her. Presently. Mrs. Roughsedge, seeing that it was a sunny day and the garden looked tempting, asked to be allowed to inspect a new greenhouse that Diana was putting up. The door leading out of the drawing-room to the moat and the formal garden was thrown open; cloaks and hats were brought, and the guests streamed out. "You are not coming?" said Hugh Roughsedge to Diana. At this question he saw a delicate flush, beyond her control, creep over her cheek and throat. " I I am expecting Mr. Marsham," she said. " Per- haps I ought to stay." Sir James Chide looked at his watch. " He should be here any minute. We will overtake you, Captain Roughsedge." l