At last he made an effort, hiding the nascent impatience in a caress.
"If I could only persuade you not to dwell upon it too persistently--to
put it from your thoughts as soon and as much as you can! Dear, we shall
have our own anxieties!"
She looked up with a sudden start.
"My mother," he said, reluctantly, "may give us trouble."
The color rushed into Diana's cheeks, and ebbed with equal suddenness.
"Lady Lucy! Oh!--how could I forget? Oliver!--she thinks--I am not fit!"
And in her eyes he saw for the first time the self-abasement he had
dreaded, yet perhaps expected, to see there before. For in her first
question to him there had been no real doubt of him; it had been the
natural humility of wounded love that cries out, expecting the reply
that no power on earth could check itself from giving were the
case reversed.
"Dearest! you know my mother's bringing up: her Quaker training, and her
rather stern ideas. We shall persuade her--in time."
"In time? And now--she--she forbids it?"
Her voice faltered. And yet, unconsciously, she had drawn herself a
little together and away.
Marsham began to give a somewhat confused and yet guarded account of his
mother's state of mind, endeavoring to prepare her for the letter which
might arrive on the morrow.
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