rhaps the connection was close.

"Did you hear the family are coming to Elmfield again this summer?"

Diana's lips formed the word "no;" the breath of it hardly got out.

"Yes, they're coming, sure enough. Phemie will be here next week; and
her sister, what's her name?--Mrs. Reverdy--is here now."

Silence.

"I suppose they'll fill the house with company, as they did last time,
and cut up their shines as usual. Well! they don't come in my way. But
you'll have to see 'em, I guess."

"Why?"

"You know they make a great to do about your husband in that family.
And Genevieve Reverdy seems uncommonly fond of you. She asked me no end
of questions about you on Sabbath."

There flushed a hot colour into Diana's cheeks, which faded away and
left them very pale.

"She hasn't grown old a bit," Mrs. Starling went on, talking rather
uneasily; "nor she hain't grown wise, neither. She can't ask you how
you do without a giggle. And she had dressed herself to come to church
as if the church was a fair and she was something for sale. Flowers,
and feathers, and laces, and ribbons, a little there and a little here;
bows on her gloves, and bows on her shoes, and bows on her gown. I
believed she would have tucked some into the corners of her mouth, if
they would have stayed."

Diana made no reply. She was looking out into the sunlit hillside in
view from her window, and had grown visibly whiter since her mother
came in. Mrs. Starling reviewed her for that instant with a keen,
anxious, searching gaze, which changed before Diana turned her head.

"I can't make out, for my part, what such folks are in the world for,"
she went on. "They don't do no good, to themselves nor to nobody else.
And fools mostly contrive to do harm. Well--she's coming to see
you;--she'll be along one of these days."

"To see me!" Diana echoed.

"So she says. Maybe it's all flummery. I daresay it is; but she talked
a lot of it. You'd ha' thought there warn't any one else in the world
she cared about seeing."

Mrs. Starling went up-stairs at this point to see the baby, and Diana
sat looking out of the window with her thoughts in a wild confusion of
pain. Pain and fright, I might say. And yet her senses took the most
delicate notice of all there was in the world outside to attract them.
Could it be June, once so fair and laughing, that smote her now with
such blows of memory's hammer? or was it Memory using June? She saw the
bright glisten of the leaves u