ad known--was full of strange comfort to Diana.
Often Muriel, watching her, would escape to her own room to hide her
tears. Fanny's second visit was not as her first. The first had seen the
outraging and repelling of the nobler nature by the ignoble. Diana had
frankly not been able to endure her cousin. There was not a trace of
that now. Her father's papers had told her abundantly how flimsy, how
nearly fraudulent, was the financial claim which Fanny and her
belongings had set up. The thousand pounds had been got practically on
false pretences, and Diana knew it now, in every detail. Yet neither
toward that, nor toward Fanny's other and worse lapses, did she show any
bitterness, any spirit of mere disgust and reprobation. The last vestige
of that just, instinctive pharisaism which clothes an unstained youth
had dropped from her. As the heir of her mother's fate, she had gone
down into the dark sea of human wrong and misery, and she had emerged
transformed, more akin by far to the wretched and the unhappy than to
the prosperous and the untempted, so that, through all repulsion and
shock, she took Fanny now as she found her--bearing with
her--accepting her--loving her, as far as she could. At the last even
that stubborn nature was touched. When Diana kissed her after the
wedding, with a few tremulous good wishes, Fanny's gulp was not all
excitement. Yet it must still be recorded that on the wedding-day Fanny
was in the highest spirits, only marred by some annoyance that she had
let Diana persuade her out of a white satin wedding-dress.

[Illustration: "SIR JAMES PLAYED DIANA'S GAME WITH PERFECT DISCRETION"]

* * * * *

Diana's preoccupation with this matter carried her through the first
week of Marsham's second campaign, and deadened so far the painful
effect of the contest now once more thundering through the division. For
it was even a more odious battle than the first had been. In the first
place, the moderate Liberals held a meeting very early in the struggle,
with Sir William Felton in the chair, to protest against the lukewarm
support which Marsham had given to the late leader of the Opposition, to
express their lamentation for Ferrier, and their distrust of Lord
Philip; and to decide upon a policy.

At the meeting a heated speech was made by a gray-haired squire, an old
friend and Oxford contemporary of John Ferrier's, who declared that he
had it on excellent authority that the com