fore she died, was tortured by
no common pains of body and spirit. Yet she never thought of
herself--she was tormented for us. If her vision was clouded,
her prayer unwise--in that hour, no argument, no resistance
was possible.

"The man who loves you will love you well, my child. You are
not made to be lightly or faithlessly loved. He will carry
you through the passage perilous if I am no longer there to
help. To him--in the distant years--I commit you. On him be
my blessing, and the blessing, too, of that poor ghost whose
hands I seem to hold in mine as I write. Let him not be too
proud to take it!"

Diana put down the book with a low sob that sounded through the quiet
room. Then she opened the garden door and stepped on to the terrace. The
night was cold but not frosty; there was a waning moon above the
autumnal fulness of the garden and the woods.

A "spirit in her feet" impelled her. She went back to the house, found a
cloak and hat, put out the lamps, and sent the servants to bed. Then
noiselessly she once more undid the drawing-room door, and stole out
into the garden and across the lawn. Soon she was in the lime-walk, the
first yellow leaves crackling beneath her feet; then in the kitchen
garden, where the apples shone dimly on the laden boughs, where
sunflowers and dahlias and marigolds, tall white daisies and late
roses--the ghosts of their daylight selves--dreamed and drooped under
the moon; where the bees slept and only great moths were abroad. And so
on to the climbing path and the hollows of the down. She walked quickly
along the edge of it, through hanging woods of beech that clothed the
hill-side. Sometimes the trees met in majestic darkness above her head,
and the path was a glimmering mystery before her. Sometimes the ground
broke away on her left--abruptly--in great chasms, torn from the
hill-side, stripped of trees, and open to the stars. Down rushed the
steep slopes to the plain, clad in the decaying leaf and mast of former
years, and at the edges of these precipitous glades, or scattered at
long intervals across them, great single trees emerged, the types and
masters of the forest, their trunks, incomparably tall, and all their
noble limbs, now thinly veiled by a departing leafage, drawn sharp, in
black and silver, on the pale background of the chalk plain. Nothing so
grandiose as these climbing beech woods of middle England!--by day, as
it