But
I am sure that the less said--or even thought--about it, the
better. You won't think me unkind, will you?

"You will see a report of my speech in the debate to-morrow.
It certainly made an impression, and I must manage, if I can,
to stick to Parliament. But we will consult when we meet.

"Your most loving OLIVER."

As he wrote it Marsham had been uncomfortably conscious of another self
beside him--mocking, or critical.

"I don't regret it for myself." Pshaw! What was there to choose between
him and his mother? There, on his writing-table, lay a number of recent
bills, and some correspondence as to a Scotch moor he had persuaded his
mother to take for the coming season. There was now to be an end, he
supposed, to the expenditure which the bills represented, and an end to
expensive moors. "I don't regret it for myself." Damned humbug! When did
any man, brought up in wealth, make the cold descent to poverty and
self-denial without caring? Yet he let the sentence stand. He was too
sleepy, too inert, to rewrite it.

And how cold were all his references to the catastrophe! He groaned as
he thought of Diana--as though he actually saw the vulture gnawing at
the tender breast. Had she slept?--had the tears stopped? Let him tear
up the beastly thing, and begin again!

No. His head fell forward on his arm. Some dull weight of character--of
disillusion--interposed. He could do no better. He shut, stamped, and
posted what he had written.

* * * * *

At mid-day, in her Brookshire village, Diana received the letter--with
another from London, in a handwriting she did not know.

When she had read Marsham's it dropped from her hand. The color flooded
her cheeks--as though the heart leaped beneath a fresh blow which it
could not realize or measure. Was it so she would have written to
Oliver if--

She was sitting at her writing-table in the drawing-room. Her eyes
wandered through the mullioned window beside her to the hill-side and
the woods. This was Wednesday. Four days since, among those trees,
Oliver had spoken to her. During those four days it seemed to her that,
in the old Hebrew phrase, she had gone down into the pit. All the
nameless dreads and terrors of her youth, all the intensified fears of
the last few weeks, had in a few minutes become real and verified--only
in a shape infinitely more terrible than any fear among them all had
ever dared to prophesy