than ever. It was little
he did to recommend himself when he was there; he generally sat
watching Diana, carrying on a spasmodic and interrupted conversation
with Mrs. Starling about farm affairs, and seizing the opportunity of a
dropped spool or an unwound skein of yarn to draw near Diana and
venture some word to her. Poor Diana felt in those days so much like a
person whose earthly ties are all broken, that it did not come into her
head in what a different light she stood to other eyes.

CHAPTER XVIII.

A SNOWSTORM.

As the weeks of September rolled away, they brought by the necessary
force of associations a sharp waking up to Diana's torpor. These, last
year, had been the weeks of her happiness; happiness had come to her
dressed in these robes of autumn light and colour; and now every breath
of the soft atmosphere, every gleam from the changing foliage, the
light's peculiar tone, and the soft indolence of the hazy days, stole
into the recesses of Diana's heart, and smote on the nerves that
answered every touch with vibrations of pain. The AEolian harp that had
sounded such soft harmonies a year ago, when the notes rose and fell in
breathings of joy, clanged now with sharp and keen discords that Diana
could scarcely bear. The time of blackberries passed without her
joining the yearly party which went as usual; she escaped that; but
there was no escaping September. And when in due course the time for
the equinoctial storms came, and the storms did not fail, though coming
this year somewhat later than the last, Diana felt like a person
wakened up to life to die the second time. Her mood all changed. From a
dull, miserable apathy, which yet had somewhat of the numbness of death
in it, she woke up to the intense life of pain, and to a corresponding,
but in her most unwonted, irritability of feeling. All of a sudden, as
it were, she grew sensitive to whatever in her life and surroundings
was untoward or trying. She read through Will Flandin's devotion; she
saw what her mother was "driving at," as she would have expressed it.
And the whole reality of her relations to Evan and his relations to her
stood in colours as distinct as those of the red and green maple
leaves, and unsoftened by the least haze of self-delusion. In the dash
of the rain and the roar of the wind, in the familiar swirl of the elm
branches, she read as it were her sentence of death. Before this she
had not been dead, only stunned; now she