Her eyes
wandered through the mullioned window beside her to the hill-side and
the woods. This was Wednesday. Four days since, among those trees,
Oliver had spoken to her. During those four days it seemed to her that,
in the old Hebrew phrase, she had gone down into the pit. All the
nameless dreads and terrors of her youth, all the intensified fears of
the last few weeks, had in a few minutes become real and verified--only
in a shape infinitely more terrible than any fear among them all had
ever dared to prophesy. The story of her mother--the more she knew of
it, the more she realized it, the more sharply it bit into the tissues
of life; the more it seemed to set Juliet Sparling and Juliet Sparling's
child alone by themselves--in a dark world. Diana had never yet had the
courage to venture out-of-doors since the news came to her; she feared
to see even her old friends the Roughsedges, and had been invisible to
them since the Saturday; she feared even the faces of the
village children.
All through she seemed to have been clinging to Marsham's supporting
hand as to the clew which might--when nature had had its way--lead her
back out of this labyrinth of pain.
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