or through a street-opening--lovely and remote. All that was real--all
that lived--was the image within the mind; not the great
earth-show without.

As she passed through the village she fell in with the Roughsedges: the
doctor, with his wide-awake on the back of his head, a book and a
bulging umbrella under his arm; Mrs. Roughsedge, in a new shawl, and new
bonnet-strings, with a prodigal flutter of side curls beside her ample
countenance. Hugh, it appeared, was expected by an evening train. Diana
begged that he might be brought up to see her some time in the course of
the following afternoon. Then she drove on, and Mrs. Roughsedge was left
staring discontentedly at her husband.

"I think she _was_ glad, Henry?"

"Think it, my dear, if it does you any good," said the doctor,
cheerfully.

* * * * *

When Diana reached home night had fallen--a moon-lit night, through
which all the shapes and even the colors of day were still to be seen or
divined in a softened and pearly mystery. Muriel Colwood was not at
home. She had gone to town, on one of her rare absences, to meet some
relations. Diana missed her, and yet was conscious that even the watch
of those kind eyes would--to-night--have added to the passionate torment
of thought.

As she sat alone in the drawing-room after her short and solitary meal
her nature bent and trembled under the blowing of those winds of fate,
which, like gusts among autumn trees, have tested or strained or
despoiled the frail single life since time began; winds of love and
pity, of desire and memory, of anguish and of longing.

Only her dog kept her company. Sometimes she rose out of restlessness,
and moved about the room, and the dog's eyes would follow her, dumbly
dependent. The room was dimly lit; in the mirrors she saw now and then
the ghostly passage of some one who seemed herself and not herself. The
windows were open to a misty garden, waiting for moonrise; in the house
all was silence; only from the distant road and village came voices
sometimes of children, or the sounds of a barrel-organ, fragmentary
and shrill.

Loneliness ached in her heart--spoke to her from the future. And five
miles away Oliver, too, was lonely--and in pain. _Pain_!--the thought of
it, as of something embodied and devilish, clutching and tearing at a
man already crushed and helpless--gave her no respite. The tears ran
down her cheeks as she moved to and fro, her hands at he