But after awhile he felt his efforts fail. The scenes that held her mind
betrayed themselves in her recurrent pallor, the trembling of her hand
in his, her piteous, sudden looks. She did not talk of her mother, but
he could not presently rouse her to talk of anything else; she sat
silent in her chair, gazing before her, her slender hands on her knee,
dreaming and forlorn.

Then he remembered, and with involuntary relief, that he must get back
to town, and to the House, for an important division. He told her, and
she made no protest. Evidently she was already absorbed in the thought
of Sir James Chide's visit. But when the time came for him to go she let
herself be kissed, and then, as he was moving away, she caught his hand,
and held it wildly to her lips.

"Oh, if you hadn't come!--if you hadn't come!" Her tears fell on the
hand.

"But I did come!" he said, caressing her. "I was here last night--did
Mrs. Colwood tell you? Afterward--in the dark--I walked up to the hill,
only to look down upon this house, that held you."

"If I had known," she murmured, on his breast, "I should have slept."

He went--in exaltation; overwhelmed by her charm even in this eclipse of
grief, and by the perception of her passion.

But before he was half-way to London he felt that he had been rather
foolish and quixotic in not having told her simply and practically what
his mother's opposition meant. She must learn it some day; better from
him than others. His mother, indeed, might tell her in the letter she
had threatened to write. But he thought not. Nobody was more loftily
secret as to business affairs than Lady Lucy; money might not have
existed for the rare mention she made of it. No; she would base her
opposition on other grounds.

These reflections brought him back to earth, and to the gloomy pondering
of the situation. Half a million!--because of the ill-doing of a poor
neurotic woman--twenty years ago!

It filled him with a curious resentment against Juliet Sparling herself,
which left him still more out of sympathy with Diana's horror and grief.
It must really be understood, when they married, that Mrs. Sparling's
name was never to be mentioned between them--that the whole grimy
business was buried out of sight forever.

And with a great and morbid impatience he shook the recollection from
him. The bustle of Whitehall, as he drove down it, was like wine in his
veins; the crowd and the gossip of the Central Lobby, as he pre