Muriel Colwood had at once
perceived it; Marsham had been sometimes puzzled by the signs of it.

To-day--because of Fanny and this toppling of her dreams--the dark mood,
to which Diana was always liable, had descended heavily upon her. She
had no sooner rebuked it--by the example of the poor, or the remembrance
of her father's long patience--than she was torn by questions, vehement,
insistent, full of a new anguish.

Why had her father been so unhappy? What was the meaning of that cloud
under which she had grown up?

She had repeated to Muriel Colwood the stock explanations she had been
accustomed to give herself of the manner and circumstances of her
bringing-up. To-day they seemed to her own mind, for the first time,
utterly insufficient. In a sudden crash and confusion of feeling it was
as though she were tearing open the heart of the past, passionately
probing and searching.

Certain looks and phrases of Fanny Merton were really working in her
memory. They were so light--yet so ugly. They suggested something, but
so vaguely that Diana could find no words for it: a note of desecration,
of cheapening--a breath of dishonor. It was as though a mourner, shut
in for years with sacred memories, became suddenly aware that all the
time, in a sordid world outside, these very memories had been the sport
of an unkind and insolent chatter that besmirched them.

Her mother!

In the silence of the wood the girl's slender figure stiffened itself
against an attacking thought. In her inmost mind she knew well that it
was from her mother--and her mother's death--that all the strangeness of
the past descended. But yet the death and grief she remembered had never
presented themselves to her as they appear to other bereaved ones. Why
had nobody ever spoken to her of her mother in her childhood and
youth?--neither father, nor nurses, nor her old French governess? Why
had she no picture--no relics--no letters? In the box of "Sparling
Papers" there was nothing that related to Mrs. Sparling; that she knew,
for her father had abruptly told her so not long before his death. They
were old family records which he could not bear to destroy--the
honorable records of an upright race, which some day, he thought, "might
be a pleasure to her."

Often during the last six months of his life, it seemed to her now, in
this intensity of memory, that he had been on the point of breaking the
silence of a lifetime. She recalled moments and looks of a