real value in life--how had _his_ been worth living?

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 Englishman 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
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 radiance 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