a moment,
withered all reply on Mrs. Colwood's lips. She walked to the door
mechanically, to see that it was fast shut. Then she returned. She sat
down beside Diana's guest, and it might have been seen that she had
silenced fear and dismissed hesitation. "After all," she said, with
quiet command, "I think I will ask you, Miss Merton, to explain what
you mean?"

* * * * *

The February afternoon darkened round the old house. There was a light
powdering of snow on grass and trees. Yet still there were breathings
and bird-notes in the air, and tones of color in the distance, which
obscurely prophesied the spring. Through the wood behind the house the
snow-drops were rising, in a white invading host, over the ground
covered with the red-brown deposit of innumerable autumns. Above their
glittering white, rose an undergrowth of laurels and box, through which
again shot up the magnificent trunks--gray and smooth and round--of the
great beeches, which held and peopled the country-side, heirs of its
ancestral forest. Any one standing in the wood could see, through the
leafless trees, the dusky blues and rich violets of the encircling
hill--hung there, like the tapestry of some vast hall; or hear from time
to time the loud wings of the wood-pigeons as they clattered through the
topmost boughs.

Diana was still in the village. She had been spending her hour of escape
mostly with the Roughsedges. The old doctor among his books was now
sufficiently at his ease with her to pet her, teach her, and, when
necessary, laugh at her. And Mrs. Roughsedge, however she might feel
herself eclipsed by Lady Lucy, was, in truth, much more fit to minister
to such ruffled feelings as Diana was now conscious of than that
delicate and dignified lady. Diana's disillusion about her cousin was,
so far, no very lofty matter. It hurt; but on her run to the village the
natural common-sense Mrs. Colwood had detected had wrestled stoutly with
her wounded feelings. Better take it with a laugh! To laugh, however,
one must be distracted; and Mrs. Roughsedge, bubbling over with gossip
and good-humor, was distraction personified. Stern Justice, in the
person of Lord M.'s gamekeeper, had that morning brought back Diana's
two dogs in leash, a pair of abject and convicted villains, from the
delirium of a night's hunting. The son of Miss Bertram's coachman had
only just missed an appointment under the District Council by one place
o