liver!--Oliver!" She was unable to bear the relief his words
brought her: she broke down under it.

He caught her in his arms at last, and she gave way--she let herself be
weak--and woman. Clinging to him with all the pure passion of a woman
and all the trust of a child, she felt his kisses on her cheek, and her
deep sobs shook her upon his breast. Marsham's being was stirred to its
depths. He gave her the best he had to give; and in that moment of
mortal appeal on her side and desperate pity on his, their natures met
in that fusion of spirit and desire wherewith love can lend even tragedy
and pain to its own uses.

* * * * *

And yet--and yet!--was it in that very moment that feeling--on the man's
side--"o'erleaped itself, and fell on the other"? When they resumed
conversation, Marsham's tacit expectation was that Diana would now show
herself comforted; that, sure of him and of his affection, she would now
be ready to put the tragic past aside; to think first and foremost of
her own present life and his, and face the future cheerfully. A
misunderstanding arose between them, indeed, which is, perhaps, one of
the typical misunderstandings between men and women. The man, impatient
of painful thoughts and recollections, eager to be quit of them as
weakening and unprofitable, determined to silence them by the pleasant
clamor of his own ambitions and desires; the woman, priestess of the
past, clinging to all the pieties of memory, in terror lest she forget
the dead, feeling it a disloyalty even to draw the dagger from the
wound--between these two figures and dispositions there is a deep and
natural antagonism.

It showed itself rapidly in the case of Marsham and Diana; for their
moment of high feeling was no sooner over, and she sitting quietly
again, her hand in his, the blinding tears dashed away, than Marsham's
mind flew inevitably to his own great sacrifice. She must be comforted,
indeed, poor child! yet he could not but feel that he, too, deserved
consolation, and that his own most actual plight was no less worthy of
her thoughts than the ghastly details of a tragedy twenty years old.

Yet she seemed to have forgotten Lady Lucy!--to have no inkling of the
real situation. And he could find no way in which to break it.

For, in little broken sentences of horror and recollection, she kept
going back to her mother's story--her father's silence and suffering. It
was as though her mind cou