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.
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