weak," he said, incoherently. He raised her
hand as it lay across his breast and kissed it. Then he dropped it
despairingly.

"The awful thing is that when the pain comes I care about nothing--not
even you--_nothing_. And it's coming now. Go!--dearest. Good-night.
To-morrow!--Call my servant." And as she fled she heard a sound of
anguish that was like a sword in her own heart.

His servant hurried to him; in the passage outside Diana found Lady
Lucy. They went back to the sitting-room together.

"The morphia will ease him," said Lady Lucy, with painful composure,
putting her arm round the girl's shoulders. "Did he tell you he
was dying?"

Diana nodded, unable to speak.

"It may be so. But the doctors don't agree." Then with a manner that
recalled old days: "May I ask--I don't know that I have the right--what
he said to you?"

She had withdrawn her arm, and the two confronted each other.

"Perhaps you won't allow it," said Diana, piteously. "He said I might
only stay, if--if he might tell me--he loved me."

"Allow it?" said Lady Lucy, vaguely--"allow it?"

She fell into her chair, and Diana looked down upon her, hanging on the
next word.

Lady Lucy made various movements as though to speak, which came to
nothing.

"I have no one--but him," she said at last, with pathetic irrelevance.
"No one. Isabel--"

Her voice failed her. Diana held out her hands, the tears running down
her cheeks. "Dear Lady Lucy, let me! I am yours--and Oliver's."

"It will, perhaps, be only a few weeks--or months--and then he will be
taken from us."

"But give me the right to those weeks. You wouldn't--you wouldn't
separate us now!"

Lady Lucy suddenly broke down. Diana clung to her with tears, and in
that hour she became as a daughter to the woman who had sentenced her
youth. Lady Lucy asked no pardon in words, to Diana's infinite relief;
but the surrender of weakness and sorrow was complete. "Sir James will
forbid it," she said at last, when she had recovered her calm.

"No one shall forbid it!" said Diana, rising with a smile. "Now, may I
answer some of those letters for you?"

* * * * *

For some weeks after this Diana went backward and forward daily, or
almost daily, between Beechcote and Tallyn. Then she migrated to Tallyn
altogether, and Muriel Colwood with her. Before and after that migration
wisdom had been justified of her children in the person of the doctor.
Hugh Roughsedge's leav