"Miss Drake?" said the doctor, looking up. "Handsome girl! I saw Marsham in a dog-cart with her yesterday afternoon."
Mrs. Roughsedge flushed an angry red, but she said nothing. She was encumbered with parcels, and her husband rose to open the door for her. He stooped and looked into her face.
"You didn't say anything about that, Patricia, I'll be bound!"
Meanwhile, Diana was wandering about the Beechcote garden, with her hands full of roses, just gathered. The garden glowed under the westering sun. In the field just below it the silvery lines of new-cut hay lay hot and fragrant in the quivering light. The woods on the hill-side were at the richest moment of their new life, the earth-forces swelling and rioting through every root and branch, wild roses climbing every hedge--the miracle of summer at its height.
Diana sat down upon a grass-bank, to look and dream. The flowers dropped beside her; she propped her face on her hands.
The home-coming had been hard. And perhaps the element in it she had felt most difficult to bear had been the universal sympathy with which she had been greeted. It spoke from the faces of the poor--the men and women, the lads and girls of the village; with their looks of curiosity, sometimes frank, sometimes furtive or embarrassed. It was more politely disguised in the manners and tones of the gentle people; but everywhere it was evident; and sometimes it was beyond her endurance.
She could not help imagining the talk about her in her absence; the discussion of the case in the country-houses or in the village. To the village people, unused to the fine discussions which turn on motive and environment, and slow to revise an old opinion, she was just the daughter--
She covered her eyes--one hideous word ringing brutally, involuntarily, through her brain. By a kind of miserable obsession the talk in the village public-houses shaped itself in her mind. "Ay, they didn't hang her because she was a lady. She got off, trust her! But if it had been you or me--"
She rose, trembling, trying to shake off the horror, walking vaguely through the garden into the fields, as though to escape it. But the horror pursued her, only in different forms. Among the educated people--people who liked dissecting "interesting" or "mysterious" crimes--there had been no doubt long discussions of Sir James Chide's letter to the Times, of Sir Francis Wing's confession. But through all the talk, rustic or refined, she heard the name of her mother bandied; forever soiled and dishonored; with no right to privacy or courtesy any more--"Juliet Sparling" to all the world: the loafer at the street corner--the drunkard in the tavern--