such would come to her, especially among the younger
women,--a comforter to those in trouble. Such a comforter! "Lips of
healing," her husband said of her once; "wise, rare; sweet as honey,
but with the savour of the wind blowing over wild thyme." If a little
of that sweetness could have come to him! But while her life was full
of observance for him, gentle and submissive as a child to every
expressed wish of his, and watchful to meet his unexpressed wish, it
was the grief of Diana's life that she did not love this man. In the
reserve of her New England nature, I think what she felt for him was
hidden even from herself.

That is, I mean, as days and months went on. At Diana's first coming
home from Clifton, no doubt her opinion of her own feelings, and
Basil's opinion of them, was correct. If a change came, it came so
imperceptibly that nobody knew it.

Diana's beauty at this time had taken a new phasis. It had lost the
marble rigidity and calm impassiveness which had characterized it
during all the time of her married life hitherto; and it had not
regained the careless lightness of the days before she knew Evan. It
was something lovelier than either; so lovely that Basil wondered, and
Mrs. Starling sometimes stared, and every lip "in town" came to have
nothing but utterances of respect, more often utterances of devotion,
for the minister's wife,--I am afraid I cannot give you a just
impression of it. For Diana's face had come curiously near the
expression on the face of her own little child. Innocent, tender,
pure,--something like that. Grave, but with no clouds at all; strong
and purposeful, yet with an utter absence of self-will or
self-consciousness. It had always been, to a certain degree, innocent
and pure, but that was negative; and this was positive,--the refined
gold that had been through the fire. And no baby's face is sweeter than
Diana's was now, all blossoming as it were with love and humility. If
her husband had loved her before, the feeling of longing and despair
that came over him when he looked at this rarefied beauty would be hard
to tell. He had ruined her life, he reproached himself; and she was
lost to him for ever. Yet, as I said, though Diana's face was grave, it
was a gravity wholly without clouds; the gravity of the summer dawn,
when the stars are shining and the light in the East tells of the
coming day.

But mental changes work slowly and insensibly ofttimes; and day after
day and week af