And now, how near she was to him--and yet how infinitely remote!
She walked beside him, her step faltering now and then, her head thrown
back, as though she craved for air and coolness on her brow and
tear-stained eyes. He could not flatter himself that his presence
disturbed her, that she was thinking at all about him. As for him, his
mind, held as it still was in the grip of catastrophe, and stunned by
new compunctions, was still susceptible from time to time of the most
discordant and agitating recollections--memories glancing,
lightning-quick, through the mind, unsummoned and shattering. Her face
in the moonlight, her voice in the great words of her promise--"all that
a woman can!"--that wretched evening in the House of Commons when he had
finally deserted her--a certain passage with Alicia, in the Tallyn
woods--these images quivered, as it were, through nerve and vein,
disabling and silencing him.
But presently, to his astonishment, Diana began to talk, in her natural
voice, without a trace of preoccupation or embarrassment. She poured out
her latest recollections of Ferrier. She spoke, brushing away her tears
sometimes, of his visit in the morning, and his talk as he lay beside
them on the grass--his recent letters to her--her remembrance of him
in Italy.
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