Colwood.
She seemed to hear her father's voice. "No shirking, Diana! You asked
her--you formed absurd and exaggerated expectations. She is here; and
she is not responsible for your expectations. Make the best of her, and
do your duty!"
And eagerly the child's heart answered: "Yes, yes, papa!--dear papa!"
And there, sharp in color and line, it rose on the breast of memory, the
beloved face. It set pulses beating in Diana which from her childhood
onward had been a life within her life, a pain answering to pain, the
child's inevitable response to the father's misery, always discerned,
never understood.
This abiding remembrance of a dumb unmitigable grief beside which she
had grown up, of which she had never known the secret, was indeed one of
the main factors in Diana's personality. 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.
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