ver is; but she
was to-day. What's up? I've been lying here long enough for plenty of
things to happen; and she's had the house to herself. Knowlton has been
here--she owned that; well, either he has been here too often, or not
often enough. I'll find out which. She's thinkin' about him. Then that
coffee--_was_ it coffee, last night? I could have sworn to it; just the
smell of fresh, steaming coffee. I didn't dream it. She wasn't
surprised, either; she had nothing to say about it. She would have
laughed at it once. And the ashes in the chimney! There's been a sight
o' wood burned there, and just burned, too; they lay light, and hadn't
been swep' up. There's mischief! but Diana never shall go off with that
young feller; never; never! Maybe she won't have Will Flandin; but she
sha'n't have him."

Mrs. Starling lay thinking and staring out of her window, till she felt
she could go down-stairs again. And then she watched. But Diana had put
every possible tell-tale circumstance out of the way. The very ashes
were no longer where her mother could speculate upon them; pies and
cakes showed no more suspiciously-cut halves or quarters; she had even
been out to the barn, and found that Josiah, for reasons of his own,
was making the door-latch and hinges firm and fast. It was no time now,
to tell her mother her secret. Her heart was too sore to brave the
rasping speech she would be certain to provoke. And with a widely
different feeling, it was too rich in its prize to drag the treasure
forth before scornful eyes. For this was part of Diana's experience,
she found; and the feeling grew, the feeling of being rich in her
secret possession; rich as she never had been before; perhaps the
richer for the secresy. It was all hers, this beautiful, wonderful love
that had come to her; this share in another person's heart and life;
her own wholly; no one might intermeddle with her joy; she treasured it
and gloated over it in the depths of her glad consciousness.

And so, as the days went by, there was no change that her mother could
see in the sweet lines of her daughter's face. Nothing less sweet than
usual; nothing less bright and free; if the eyes had a deeper depth at
times, it was not for Mrs. Starling to penetrate; and if the childlike
play of the mouth had a curve of beauty that had never until then
belonged to it, the archetype of such a sign did not lie in Mrs.
Starling's nature. Yet once or twice a jealous movement of suspicion