e, there was a child in the village--a dear child--ill and
wasting--in a spinal jacket, for whom one would do anything--just
anything! And there was Betty Dyson--plucky, cheerful old soul. But that
was another matter.

What, she asked, had she to give the poor? She wanted guiding and
helping and putting in the right way herself. She could not preach to
any one--wrestle with any one. And ought one to make out of others' woes
plasters for one's own? To use the poor as the means of a spiritual
"cure" seemed a dubious indecent thing; more than a touch in it of
arrogance--or sacrilege.

* * * * *

Meanwhile she had been fighting her fight in the old ways. She had been
falling back on her education, appealing to books and thought, reminding
herself of what the life of the mind had been to her father in his
misery, and of those means of cultivating it to which he would certainly
have commended her. She was trying to learn a new foreign language, and,
under Marion Vincent's urging, the table in the little sitting-room was
piled with books on social and industrial matters, which she diligently
read and pondered.

It was all struggle and effort. But it had brought her some reward. And
especially through Marion Vincent's letters, and through the long day
with Marion in London, which she had now to look back upon. For Miss
Vincent and Frobisher had returned, and Marion was once more in her
Stepney rooms. She was apparently not much worse; would allow no talk
about herself; and though she had quietly relinquished all her old
activities, her room was still the centre it had long been for the
London thinker and reformer.

Diana found there an infinity to learn. The sages and saints, it seemed,
are of all sides and all opinions. That had not been the lesson of her
youth. In a comforting heat of prejudice her father had found relief
from suffering, and his creeds had been fused with her young blood.
Lately she had seen their opposites embodied in a woman from whom she
shrank in repulsion--whose name never passed her lips--Oliver's
sister--who had trampled on her in her misery. Yet here, in Marion's
dingy lodging, she saw the very same ideas which Isabel Fotheringham
made hateful, clothed in light, speaking from the rugged or noble faces
of men and women who saw in them the salvation of their kind.

The intellect in Diana, the critical instinct resisted. And, moreover,
to have abandoned any fraction