with young men is always a matter of interest to older women.
Mrs. Colwood thought that Diana's manner to the young soldier could not
have been easily bettered. It was frank and gay--with just that tinge of
old-fashioned reserve which might be thought natural in a girl of gentle
breeding, brought up alone by a fastidious father. With all her
impetuosity, indeed, there was about her something markedly virginal
and remote, which is commoner, perhaps, in Irish than English women.
Mrs. Colwood watched the effect of it on Captain Roughsedge. After her
third day of acquaintance with him, she said to herself: "He will fall
in love with her!" But she said it with compassion, and without
troubling to speculate on the lady. Whereas, with regard to the Marsham
visit, she already--she could hardly have told why--found herself full
of curiosity.

Meanwhile, in the few days which elapsed before that visit was due,
Diana was much called on by the country-side. The girl restrained her
restlessness, and sat at home, receiving everybody with a friendliness
which might have been insipid but for its grace and spontaneity. She
disliked no one, was bored by no one. The joy of her home-coming seemed
to halo them all. Even the sour Miss Bertrams could not annoy her; she
thought them sensible and clever; even the tiresome Mrs. Minchin of
Minchin Hall, the "gusher" of the county, who "adored" all mankind and
ill-treated her step-daughter, even she was dubbed "very kind," till
Mrs. Roughsedge, next day, kindled a passion in the girl's eyes by some
tales of the step-daughter. Mrs. Colwood wondered whether, indeed, she
_could_ be bored, as Mrs. Minchin had not achieved it. Those who talk
easily and well, like Diana, are less keenly aware, she thought, of the
platitudes of their neighbors. They are not defenceless, like the shy
and the silent.

Nevertheless, it was clear that if Diana welcomed the neighbors with
pleasure she often saw them go with relief. As soon as the house was
clear of them, she would stand pensively by the fire, looking down into
the blaze like one on whom a dream suddenly descends--then would often
call her dog, and go out alone, into the winter twilight. From these
rambles she would return grave--sometimes with reddened eyes. But at all
times, as Mrs. Colwood soon began to realize, there was but a thin line
of division between her gayety and some inexplicable sadness, some
unspoken grief, which seemed to rise upon her and ove