She resumed: "It is like her--so like her!--isn't it?"
Her soft pitiful eyes, into which the tears had sprung, pressed the
question on him.
"I thought there was a cousin--Miss Drake?" he said, roughly.
Mrs. Colwood hesitated.
"It is said that all that is broken off."
He was silent. But his watch was on the garden. And suddenly, on the
long grass path, Diana appeared, side by side with the Vicar. Roughsedge
sprang up. Muriel was arrested by Diana's face, and by something rigid
in the carriage of the head. What had the Vicar been saying to her?--she
asked herself, angrily. Never was there anything less discreet than the
Vicar's handling of human nature!--female human nature, in particular.
Hugh Roughsedge opened the glass door, and went to meet them. Diana, at
sight of him, gave a bewildered look, as though she scarcely knew
him--then a perfunctory hand.
"Captain Roughsedge! They didn't tell me--"
"I want to speak to you," said the Vicar, peremptorily, to Mrs. Colwood;
and he carried her off round the corner of the house.
Diana gazed after them, and Roughsedge thought he saw her totter.
"You look so ill!" he said, stooping over her.
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