Scotland; the best
golfing, fishing, and travelling: all these had come to him year after
year since his boyhood, without question. His mother, of course, had
provided the majority of them, for his own small income and his
allowance from her were absorbed by his personal expenses, his
Parliamentary life, and the subscriptions to the party, which--in
addition to his mother's--made him, as he was well aware, a person of
importance in its ranks, quite apart from his record in the House.

Now all that must be given up. He would be reduced to an
income--including what he imagined to be Diana's--of less than half his
personal spending hitherto; and those vast perspectives implied in the
inheritance at his mother's death of his father's half million must also
be renounced.

No doubt he could just maintain himself in Parliament. But
everything--judged by the standards he had been brought up in--would be
difficult where everything till now had been ease.

He knew his mother too well to doubt her stubbornness, and his feeling
was bitter, indeed. Bitter, too, against his father, who had left him in
this plight. Why had his father distrusted and wronged him so? He
recalled with discomfort certain collisions of his youth; certain
disappointments at school and college he had inflicted on his father's
ambition; certain lectures and gibes from that strong mouth, in his
early manhood. Absurd! If his father had had to do with a really
spendthrift and unsatisfactory son, there might have been some sense in
it. But for these trifles--these suspicions--these foolish notions of a
doctrinaire--to inflict this stigma and this yoke on him all his days!

Suddenly his wanderings along the moon-lit hill came to a stand-still.
For he recognized the hollow in the chalk--the gnarled thorn--the wide
outlook. He stood gazing about him--a shamed lover; conscious of a dozen
contradictory feelings. Beautiful and tender Diana!--"Stick to her,
Oliver!--she is worth it!" Chide's eager and peremptory tone smote on
the inward ear. Of course he would stick to her. The only thing which it
gave him any pleasure to remember in this nightmare of a day was his own
answer to Ferrier's suggestion that Diana might release him: "Do you
imagine I could be such a hound as to let her?" As he said it, he had
been conscious that the words rang well; that he had struck the right
attitude, and done the right thing. Of course he had done the right
thing! What would he, or a