d be
wrought upon to make such a humiliation of herself! She was forced to
give up that thought. And indeed she was not clear about the essential
distinction between communicating directly herself with Evan, and
getting another to do it for her. And what had been Mrs. Starling's
motive in keeping back the letters? But Diana knew her mother, and that
problem did not detain her long.

For hours and hours Diana's mind was like a stormy sea, where the
thunder and the lightning were not wanting any more than the wind. Once
in a while, like the faint blink of a sun-ray through the clouds, came
an echo of the words Basil had quoted--"In the shadow of thy wings will
I make my refuge"--but they hurt her so that she fled from them. The
contrast of their peace with her turmoil, of their intense sweetness
with the bitter passion which was wasting her heart; the hint of that
harbour for the storm-tossed vessel, which could only be entered, she
knew, by striking sail; all that was unbearable. I suppose there was a
whisper of conscience, too, which said, "Strike sail, and go
in!"--while passion would not take down an inch of canvas. _Could_ not,
she said to herself. Could she submit to have things be as they were?
submit, and be quiet, and accept them, and go her way accepting them,
and put the thought of Evan away, and live the rest of her life as
though he had no existence? That was the counsel Basil would give, she
had an unrecognised consciousness; and for the present, pain was easier
to bear than that. And now memory flew back over the years, and took up
again the thread of her relations with Evan, and traced them to their
beginning; and went over all the ground, going back and forward,
recalling every meeting, and reviewing every one of those too scanty
hours. For a long while she had not been able to do this, because Evan,
she thought, had been faithless, and in that case she really never had
had what she thought she had in him. Now she knew he was not faithless,
and she had got the time and him back again, and she in a sort revelled
in the consciousness. And with that came then the thought, "Too
late!"--She had got him again only to see an impassable barrier set
between which must keep them apart for ever. And that barrier was her
husband. What the thought of Basil, or rather what his image was to
Diana that day, it is difficult to tell; she shunned it whenever it
appeared, with an intolerable mingling of contradictory feeling