ince Diana's return, and the girl's life had
been very monotonous during that time. She had stuck bravely to the
abridgments and the juvenile scraps of --ologies, and had been
altogether a model of propriety, sewing on such a number of strings and
buttons during the period as can only be compassed by the maternal
mind. Her existence had been by no means as joyless or desolate as such
an existence is generally represented by the writer of fiction. There
was plenty of life and bustle in the big prosperous boarding-school, if
there was not much variety. There were small scandals and small
intrigues; departures and arrivals; wonderful hampers of cake and wine
to be divided among the elect of a fashionable dormitory--for there is
as wide a difference between the tone and status of the bedrooms in a
ladies'-school as between the squares of Berkeley and Bedford. There
were breaking-up parties, and the free-and-easy idleness of the
holidays, when a few dark-complexioned girls from the colonies, a
yellow-haired damsel from the remote north of Scotland, and Miss Diana
Paget, were wont to cluster round the fire in the smaller of the
schoolrooms to tell ghost-stories or talk scandal in the gloaming.

It was a life which, taken with all its small hardships and petty
annoyances, should have been as the life of Paradise compared to that
which Diana had led with her father and Mr. Hawkehurst. Whether the
girl fully appreciated the change from the Bohemianism of her late
existence to the respectability of Hyde Lodge was a question which no
one had asked of her. She had fits of despondency now and then, even in
the midst of her duties, and was apt to fall into a sombre reverie over
one of the abridgments, whereby she was neglectful of her pupils'
aspirates, and allowed Henry the Second to be made the poorer by the
loss of an H, or Heliogabalus to be described by a name which that
individual himself would have failed to recognise.

There were times when, in the midst of that shrill Babel, the
schoolroom, Diana Paget heard the summer winds sighing in the
pine-woods above Foretdechene, and fancied herself standing once more
in that classic temple on whose plastered wall Valentine had once cut
her initials with his penknife in a fantastical monogram, surmounted by
a death's-head and encircled by a serpent. She thought of that familiar
companion very often, in spite of her juvenile pupils and the sewing-on
of tapes and buttons. He had seemed