a lighter tone: "I seem to have
given myself away--to an enemy!"

"Poor enemy!"

[Illustration: "The man's pulses leaped anew".]

He looked at her, half laughing, half anxious.

"Tell me!--last night--you thought me intolerant--overbearing?"

"I disliked being beaten," said Diana, candidly; "especially as it was
only my ignorance that was beaten--not my cause."

"Shall we begin again?"

Through his gayety, however, a male satisfaction in victory pierced very
plainly. Diana winced a little.

"No, no! I must go back to Captain Roughsedge first and get some new
arguments!"

"Roughsedge!" he said, in surprise. "Roughsedge? He never carried an
argument through in his life!"

Diana defended her new friend to ears unsympathetic. Her defence,
indeed, evoked from him a series of the same impatient, sarcastic
remarks on the subject of the neighbors as had scandalized her the day
before. She fired up, and they were soon in the midst of another
battle-royal, partly on the merits of particular persons and partly on a
more general theme--the advantage or disadvantage of an optimist view of
your fellow-creatures.

Marsham was, before long, hard put to it in argument, and very
delicately and discreetly convicted of arrogance or worse. They were
entering the woods of the park when he suddenly stopped and said:

"Do you know that you have had a jolly good revenge--pressed down and
running over?"

Diana smiled, and said nothing. She had delighted in the encounter; so,
in spite of castigation, had he. There surged up in him a happy excited
consciousness of quickened life and hurrying hours. He looked with
distaste at the nearness of the house; and at the group of figures
which had paused in front of them, waiting for them, on the farther edge
of the broad lawn.

"You have convicted me of an odious, exclusive, bullying temper--or you
think you have--and all you will allow _me_ in the way of victory is
that I got the best of it because Captain Roughsedge wasn't there!"

"Not at all. I respect your critical faculty!"

"You wish to hear me gush like Mrs. Minchin. It is simply astounding the
number of people you like!"

Diana's laugh broke into a sigh.

"Perhaps it's like a hungry boy in a goody-shop. He wants to eat them
all."

"Were you so very solitary as a child?" he asked her, gently, in a
changed tone, which was itself an act of homage, almost a caress.

"Yes--I was very solitary," she said, after a pause. "And