ssed his
way through to the door of the House of Commons, had never been so full
of stimulus or savor. In this agreeable, exciting world he knew his
place; the relief was enormous; and, for a time, Marsham was
himself again.

* * * * *

Sir James Chide came in the late afternoon; and in her two hours with
him, Diana learned, from lips that spared her all they could, the
heart-breaking story of which Fanny had given her but the
crudest outlines.

The full story, and its telling, taxed the courage both of hearer and
speaker. Diana bore it, as it seemed to Sir James, with the piteous
simplicity of one in whose nature grief had no pretences to overcome.
The iron entered into her soul, and her quick imagination made her
torment. But her father had taught her lessons of self-conquest, and in
this first testing of her youth she did not fail. Sir James was
astonished at the quiet she was able to maintain, and touched to the
heart by the suffering she could not conceal.

Nothing was said of his own relation to her mother's case; but he saw
that she understood it, and their hearts moved together. When he rose to
take his leave she held his hand in hers with such a look in her eyes as
a daughter might have worn; and he, with an emotion to which he gave
little outward expression, vowed to himself that henceforward she should
lack no fatherly help or counsel that he could give her.

He gathered, with relief, that the engagement persisted, and the
perception led him to praise Marsham in a warm Irish way. But he could
not find anything hopeful to say of Lady Lucy. "If you only hold to each
other, my dear young lady, things will come right!" Diana flushed and
shrank a little, and he felt--helplessly--that the battle was for their
fighting, and not his.

Meanwhile, as he had seen Mr. Riley, he did his best to prepare her for
the letters and enclosures, which had been for twenty years in the
custody of the firm, and would reach her on the morrow.

But what he did not prepare her for was the letter from Lady Lucy
Marsham which reached Beechcote by the evening post, after Sir James
had left.

The letter lay awhile on Diana's knee, unopened. Muriel Colwood,
glancing at her, went away with the tears in her eyes, and at last the
stumbling fingers broke the seal.

"MY DEAR MISS MALLORY,--I want you to understand why it is
that I must oppose your marriage with my son. You know well,
I t