The Testing of Diana Mallory

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

Diana did not reply, and as he glanced at her, he saw that she was struggling for self-control, her eyes on the ground.

"And that woman might have had her for daughter!" he said to himself, divining in her the rebuff of some deep and tender instinct.

Marsham came back.

"The ambulance is just arriving."

Sir James nodded, and turned toward the house. Marsham detained him, dropping his voice.

"Let me go with him, and you take my fly."

Sir James frowned.

"That is all settled," he said, peremptorily. Then he looked at Diana. "I will see to everything in-doors. Will you take Miss Mallory into the garden?"

Diana submitted; though, for the first time, her face reddened faintly. She understood that Sir James wished her to be out of sight and hearing while they moved the dead.

That was a strange walk together for these two! Side by side, almost in silence, they followed the garden path which had taken them to the downs, on a certain February evening. The thought of it hovered, a ghost unlaid, in both their minds. Instinctively, Marsham guided her by this path, that they might avoid that spot on the farther lawn, where the scattered chairs, the trampled books and papers still showed where Death and Sleep had descended. Yet, as they passed it from a distance he saw the natural shudder run through her; and, by association, there flashed through him intolerably the memory of that moment of divine abandonment in their last interview, when he had comforted her, and she had clung to him. 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.