"No. I was a fool," said Diana, with somewhat unreasonable perverseness. "Or, if I was not a fool, I was weak."
"I see you are strong now," said the young officer bitterly. "I was never strong; and I am weak still. I have not forgotten, Diana."
"You ought to forget, Evan," she said gently.
"It's impossible!" said he, hastily turning over photographs on the table.
Diana would have answered, but the opportunity was gone. Other people came near; the two fell apart from each other, and no more words were interchanged between them.
It grieved but did not astonish Basil to perceive, when he joined Diana in their own room that night, that she had been weeping; and it only grieved him to know that the weeping was renewed in the night. He gave no sign that he knew it, and Diana thought he was asleep through it all. Tears were by no means a favourite indulgence with her; this night the spring of them seemed to be suddenly unsealed, and they flowed fast and free, and were not to be checked. Neither did Diana quite clearly know what moved them. She was very sorry for Evan; yes, but these tears she was shedding were not painful tears. It came home to her, all the sorrowful waiting months and years that Basil had endured on her account; but sympathy was not a spring large enough to supply such a flow. She was glad those months were ended; yet they were not ended, for Basil did not know the facts she had stated with so much clearness to his whilome rival; she had not told himself, and he did not guess them. "He might," said Diana to herself,—"he ought,"—at the same time she knew now there was something for her to do. How she should do it, she did not know.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
AT ONE.
They returned to Pleasant Valley that day, and Basil was immediately plunged in arrears of business. For the present Diana had to attend to her mother, whose conversation was anything but agreeable after she learned that her son-in-law had accepted the call to Mainbridge.
"Ministers are made of stuff very like common people," she declared.
"Every one goes where he can get the most."