The story of Diana, and of Marsham's interrupted wooing was by
that time public property, probably owing to the indignation of certain
persons in Brookshire. As we have seen, it had injured the prestige of
the man concerned in and out of Parliament. But Lankester, who looked at
life intimately and intensely, with the eye of a confessor, had been
roused by it to a curiosity about Oliver Marsham--whom at the time he
was meeting habitually on political affairs--which he had never felt
before. He, with his brooding second sight based on a spiritual estimate
of the world--he and Lady Lucy--alone saw that Marsham was unhappy. His
irritable moodiness might, of course, have nothing to do with his
failure to play the man in the case of Miss Mallory. Lankester was
inclined to think it had--Alicia Drake or no Alicia Drake. And the grace
of repentance is so rare in mankind that the mystic--his own secret life
wavering perpetually between repentance and ecstasy--is drawn to the
merest shadow of it.
These hidden thoughts on Lankester's side had been met by a new and
tacit friendliness on Marsham's. He had shown an increasing liking for
Lankester's company, and had finally asked him to come down and help him
in his constituency.
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