The sooner the better! Unless she abandoned Beechcote, they must learn to meet on the footing of ordinary acquaintances; and it were best done quickly.
Voices on the lawn! Diana, peeping through the trees, beheld the Vicar in conversation with Muriel Colwood. She turned and fled, pausing at last in the deepest covert of the wood, breathless and a little ashamed.
She had seen him once since her return. Everybody was so kind to her, the Vicar, the Miss Bertrams--everybody; only the pity and the kindness burned so. She wrestled with these feelings in the wood, but she none the less kept a thick screen between herself and Mr. Lavery.
She could never forget that night of her misery when--good man that he was!--he had brought her the message of his faith.
But the great melting moments of life are rare, and the tracts between are full of small frictions. What an incredible sermon he had preached on the preceding Sunday! That any minister of the national church--representing all sorts and conditions of men--should think it right to bring his party politics into the pulpit in that way! Unseemly! unpardonable!
Her dark eyes flashed--and then clouded. She had walked home from the sermon in a heat of wrath, had straightway sought out some blue ribbon, and made Tory rosettes for herself and her dog. Muriel had laughed--had been delighted to see her doing it.
But the rosettes were put away now--thrown into the bottom of a drawer. She would never wear them.
The Vicar, it seemed, was no friend of Oliver's--would not vote for him, and had been trying to induce the miners at Hartingfield to run a Labor man. On the other hand, she understood that the Ferrier party in the division were dissatisfied with him on quite other grounds: that they reproached him with a leaning to violent and extreme views, and with a far too lukewarm support of the leader of the party and the leader's policy. The local papers were full of grumbling letters to that effect.
Her brow knit over Oliver's difficulties. The day before, Mr. Lavery, meeting Muriel in the village street, had suggested that Miss Mallory might lend him the barn for a Socialist meeting--a meeting, in fact, for the harassing and heckling of Oliver.
Had he come now to urge the same plea again? A woman's politics were not, of course, worth remembering!