After his death I saw a closed locket on his breast for the first
time. I would not have opened it for the world--I just kissed it--" Her
voice broke again; but after a moment she quietly resumed. "He changed
his name--I think--when I was about nine years old. I remember that
somehow it seemed to give him comfort--he was more cheerful with me
afterward--"
"And you have no idea what led him to go abroad?"
She shook her head. Marsham's changed and rapid tone had betrayed some
agitation in the mind behind; but Diana did not notice it. In her story
she had come to what, in truth, had been the determining and formative
influence on her own life--her father's melancholy, and the mystery in
which it had been enwrapped; and even the perceptions of love were for
the moment blinded as the old tyrannous grief overshadowed her.
"His life"--she said, slowly--"seemed for years--one long struggle to
bear--what was really--unbearable. Then when I was about nineteen there
was a change. He no longer shunned people quite in the same way, and he
took me to Egypt and India. We came across old friends of his whom I, of
course, had never seen before; and I used to wonder at the way in which
they treated him--with a kind of reverence--as though they would not
have touched him roughly for the world.
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