* * * * *

Meanwhile Diana's golden hour had found an unexpected epilogue. After
her good-night to Marsham she was walking along the gallery corridor
going toward her room, when she perceived Miss Vincent in front of her
moving slowly and, as it seemed, with difficulty. A sudden impulse made
Diana fly after her.

"Do let me help you!" she said, shyly.

Marion Vincent smiled, and put her hand in the girl's arm.

"How do people manage to live at all in these big houses, and with
dinner-parties every night!" she said, laughing. "After a day in the
East End I am never half so tired."

She was indeed so pale that Diana was rather frightened, and remembering
that in the afternoon she had seen Miss Vincent descend from an upper
floor, she offered a rest in her own room, which was close by, before
the evidently lame woman attempted further stairs.

Marion Vincent hesitated a moment, then accepted. Diana hurried up a
chair to the fire, installed her there, and herself sat on the floor
watching her guest with some anxiety.

Yet, as she did so, she felt a certain antagonism. The face, of which
the eyes were now closed, was nobly grave. The expression of its deeply
marked lines appealed to her heart. But why this singularity--this
eccentricity? Miss Vincent wore the same dress of dark woollen stuff,
garnished with white frills, in which she had appeared the night before,
and her morning attire, as Mr. Frobisher had foretold, had consisted of
a precisely similar garment, adorned with a straight collar instead of
frills. Surely a piece of acting!--of unnecessary self-assertion!

Yet all through the day--and the evening--Diana had been conscious of
this woman's presence, in a strange penetrating way, even when they had
had least to do with each other. In the intervals of her own joyous
progress she had been often aware of Miss Vincent sitting apart,
sometimes with Mr. Frobisher, who was reading or talking to her,
sometimes with Lady Lucy, and--during the dance--with John Barton.
Barton might have been the Jeremiah or the Ezekiel of the occasion. He
sat astride upon a chair, in his respectable workman's clothes, his eyes
under their shaggy brows, his weather-beaten features and compressed
lips expressing an ill-concealed contempt for the scene before him. It
was rumored that he had wished to depart before dinner, having concluded
his consultation with Mr. Ferrier, but that Mrs. Fotheringham had
pers