e erased, destroyed, or removed it. All that she had
changed within the house he put back into the state in which it was
before she came. Where he had followed her suggestions about the grounds
and gardens he reversed the orders. Taken as outward and visible signs
of the inward and spiritual change he was trying to create within
himself, these childish acts gave him a passionate satisfaction. In a
short time, he boasted to himself, he would have obliterated all trace
of her presence.

And so he came, in time, to giving his attention to Dorothea. She, too,
bore the impress of Diane; and as she bore it more markedly than the
inanimate things around, it caused him the greater pain. He could forbid
her to hold intercourse with Diane, and to speak of her; but he could
not control the blending of French and Irish intonations her voice had
caught, or the gestures into which she slipped through youth's mimetic
instinct. In happier days he had been amused to note the degree to which
Dorothea had become the unconscious copy of Diane; but now this constant
reproduction of her ways was torture. Telling himself that it was not
the child's fault, he bore it at first with what self-restraint he
could; but as solitude encouraged brooding thoughts, he found, as the
summer wore on, that his stock of patience was running low. There were
times when some chance sentence or imitated bit of mannerism on
Dorothea's part almost drew from him that which in tragedy would be a
cry, but which in our smaller life becomes the hasty or exasperated
word.

In these circumstances the explosion was bound to come; and one day it
produced itself unexpectedly, and about nothing. Thinking of it
afterward Derek was unable to say why it should have taken place then
more than at any other time. He was standing on the lawn, noting with
savage complacency that the bit by which he had enlarged it, at Diane's
prompting, had grown up again, in luxuriant grass, when Dorothea
descended the steps of the Georgian brick house, behind him.

"Would you be afther wantin' me to-day?" she called out, using the Irish
expression Diane affected in moments of fun.

"Dorothea," he cried, sharply, wheeling round on her, "drop that idiotic
way of speaking. If you think it's amusing, you're mistaken. You can't
even do it properly."

The words were no sooner out than he regretted them, but it was too late
to take them back. Moreover, when a man, nervously suffering, has once
woun