gonized effort
and yearning. 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 messages which make the treasure of bereaved love.
Often and often the cry of her loneliness to her dead father had 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 ignorance 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, is fickleness.

So, in spirit, she knelt again beside her dead, embracing 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 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. Innocent