e by side, almost in
silence, they followed the garden path which had taken them to the
downs, on a certain February evening. The thought of it hovered, a ghost
unlaid, in both their minds. Instinctively, Marsham guided her by this
path, that they might avoid that spot on the farther lawn, where the
scattered chairs, the trampled books and papers still showed where Death
and Sleep had descended. Yet, as they passed it from a distance he saw
the natural shudder run through her; and, by association, there flashed
through him intolerably the memory of that moment of divine abandonment
in their last interview, when he had comforted her, and she had clung to
him. And now, how near she was to him--and yet how infinitely remote!
She walked beside him, her step faltering now and then, her head thrown
back, as though she craved for air and coolness on her brow and
tear-stained eyes. He could not flatter himself that his presence
disturbed her, that she was thinking at all about him. As for him, his
mind, held as it still was in the grip of catastrophe, and stunned by
new compunctions, was still susceptible from time to time of the most
discordant and agitating recollections--memories glancing,
lightning-quick, through the mind, unsummoned and shattering. Her face
in the moonlight, her voice in the great words of her promise--"all that
a woman can!"--that wretched evening in the House of Commons when he had
finally deserted her--a certain passage with Alicia, in the Tallyn
woods--these images quivered, as it were, through nerve and vein,
disabling and silencing him.

But presently, to his astonishment, Diana began to talk, in her natural
voice, without a trace of preoccupation or embarrassment. She poured out
her latest recollections of Ferrier. She spoke, brushing away her tears
sometimes, of his visit in the morning, and his talk as he lay beside
them on the grass--his recent letters to her--her remembrance of him
in Italy.

Marsham listened in silence. What she said was new to him, and often
bitter. He had known nothing of this intimate relation which had sprung
up so rapidly between her and Ferrier. While he acknowledged its beauty
and delicacy, the very thought of it, even at this moment, filled him
with an irritable jealousy. The new bond had arisen out of the wreck of
those he had himself broken; Ferrier had turned to her, and she to
Ferrier, just as he, by his own acts, had lost them both; it might be
right and natural;