lad, in a dull sort of way, that Mr.
Masters should be pleased; pleasure for her was gone out of the world.
Honour him she could, and did, from the bottom of her heart; but that
was all. It was well, perhaps, for her composure that whatever pleasure
her companion might feel in their new relations, he did not make the
feeling obtrusively prominent. He was just his usual self, with a
slight confidence in his manner to her which had not appeared before.

So they walked.

"Diana," said Mr. Masters suddenly, "have you brought no lunch with
you?"

"I forgot it. At least,--I was in such a hurry to get out of the house
without being seen, I didn't care about anything else. If I had gone to
the pantry, they would have found out what I was doing."

"And I brought nothing to-day, of all days. I am sorry, for your sake."

"I don't mind it," said Diana. "I don't feel it."

"Nor I,--but that proves nothing. This won't do. It is two o'clock. We
_must_ get away. It will be growing dark in a little while more. The
days are just at the shortest."

"I think the storm isn't quite so bad as it was," said Diana.

They stood still and listened. It beat and blew, and the snow came
thick; still the exceeding fury of the blast seemed to be lessened.

"We'll give it a quarter of an hour more," said the minister.
"Diana--we have had preaching, but we have had no praying."

She assented submissively, to his look as well as his words, and they
knelt down together in the chancel. Mr. Masters prayed, not very long,
but a prayer full of the sweetness and the confidence and the strength,
of a child of God who is at home in his Father's presence; full of
tenderness and sympathy for her. Diana's mind went through a series of
experiences in the course of that short prayer. The sweetness and the
confidence of it touched her first with the sense of contrast, and
wrung tears from her that were bitter; then the speaker got beyond her
depth, into regions of feeling where she could not follow him nor quite
understand, but that, she knew, was only because he was at home where
she was so much a stranger; and her thoughts made a leap to the
admiration of _him_, and then to the useless consideration, how happy
she might have been with this man had not Evan come between. Why had he
come, just to win her and prove himself unworthy of her? But it was
done, and not to be undone. Evan had her heart, worthy or unworthy; she
could not take it back; there was not