nly flowers. I can see her still,
lying there--with her hands closed over them."

She released herself from Marsham, and, with her hand in his, she drew
him slowly along the path, while she went on speaking, with an effort
indeed, yet with a marvellous sense of deliverance--after the silence of
years. She described the entire seclusion of their life at Portofino.

"Papa never spoke to me of mamma, and I never remember a picture of
her. After his death I saw a closed locket on his breast for the first
time. I would not have opened it for the world--I just kissed it--" Her
voice broke again; but after a moment she quietly resumed. "He changed
his name--I think--when I was about nine years old. I remember that
somehow it seemed to give him comfort--he was more cheerful with me
afterward--"

"And you have no idea what led him to go abroad?"

She shook her head. Marsham's changed and rapid tone had betrayed some
agitation in the mind behind; but Diana did not notice it. In her story
she had come to what, in truth, had been the determining and formative
influence on her own life--her father's melancholy, and the mystery in
which it had been enwrapped; and even the perceptions of love were for
the moment blinded as the old tyrannous grief overshadowed her.

"His life"--she said, slowly--"seemed for years--one long struggle to
bear--what was really--unbearable. Then when I was about nineteen there
was a change. He no longer shunned people quite in the same way, and he
took me to Egypt and India. We came across old friends of his whom I, of
course, had never seen before; and I used to wonder at the way in which
they treated him--with a kind of reverence--as though they would not
have touched him roughly for the world. Then directly after we got home
to the Riviera his illness began--"

She dwelt on the long days of dumbness, and her constant sense that he
wished--in vain--to communicate something to her.

"He wanted something--and I could not give it him--could not even tell
what it was. It was misery! One day he managed to write: 'If you are in
trouble, go to Riley & Bonner--ask them.' They were his solicitors, whom
he had depended on from his boyhood. But since his death I have never
wanted anything from them but a little help in business. They have been
very good; but--I could not go and question them. If there was anything
to know--papa had not been able to tell me--I did not want anybody
else--to--"

Her voice drop