"
Had there been a quarrel between her father and mother?--or something
worse?--at which Diana's ignorance of life, imposed upon her by her
upbringing, could only glance in shuddering? She knew her mother had
died at twenty-six; and that in the two years before her death Mr.
Mallory had been much away, travelling and exploring in Asia Minor. The
young wife must have been often alone. Diana, with a sudden catching of
the breath, envisaged possibilities of which no rational being of full
age who reads a newspaper can be unaware.
Then, with an inward passion of denial, she shook the whole nightmare
from her. Outrage!--treason!--to those helpless memories of which she
was now the only guardian. In these easy, forgetting days, when the old
passions and endurances look to us either affected or eccentric, such a
life, such an exile as her father's, may seem strange even--so she
accused herself--to that father's child. But that is because we are mean
souls beside those who begot us. We cannot feel as they; and our
constancy, compared to theirs, is fickleness.
So, in spirit, she knelt again beside her dead, embracing their cold
feet and asking pardon.
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