B BUT still more bewildering is the way in which we live years and years with ourselves in an entire ignorance of the powers that lie dormant beneath the surface of character. The day comes when vital forces of which we know nothing arise within us, and break like glass the even tenor of our lives. The quiet hours, the regulated thoughts, the peaceful aspiration after things but little set above us, where are they? The angel with the sword drives us out of our Eden to shiver in the wilderness of an entirely changed existence, unrecognizable by ourselves, though perhaps lived in the same external groove, the same divisions of time, among the same faces as before.

Day succeeded day in Di's life, each day adding one more stone to the prison in which it seemed as if an inexorable hand were walling her up.

"I will not give in. I will turn my mind to other things," she said to herself. And—there were no other things. All lesser lights were blown out. The heart, when it is swept into the grasp of a great love, is ruthlessly torn from the hundred minute ties and interests that heretofore held it to life. The little fibres and tendrils of affections which have gradually grown round certain objects are snapped off from the roots. They cease to exist. The pang of love is that there is no escape from it. It has the same tension as sleeplessness.

Di struggled and was not defeated; but some victories are as sad as defeats. During the struggle she lost something—what was it—that had been to many her greatest charm? Women were unanimous in deploring how she had "gone off." There was a thinness in her cheek, and a blue line under her deep eyes. Her beauty remained, but it was not the same beauty. Mrs. Courtenay noticed with a pang that she was growing like her mother.

Easter came, and with it the wedding of Miss Crupps and the Honourable Augustus Lumley, youngest son of Lord Mortgage. Miss Crupps' young heart had long inclined towards Mr. Lumley; but on the occasion of seeing him blacked as a Christy Minstrel, she had finally succumbed into a state of giggling admiration, which plainly showed the state of her affections. So he cut the word "yes" out of a newspaper, and told her that was what she was to say to him, and amid a series of delighted cackles they were engaged. Di went to the wedding, looking so pale that it was whispered that Mr. Lumley and his tambourine had won her heart as well as that of his adoring bride.

On a sunny afternoon shortly afterwards, Di was sitting alone indoors, her grandmother having gone out driving with a friend. She told herself that she ought to go out, but she remained sitting with her hands in her lap. Every duty, every tiny decision, every small household matter, had become of late an intolerable burden. Even to put a handful of flowers into water required an effort of will which it was irksome to make.

She had stayed in to make an alteration in the gown she was to wear that night at the Speaker's. As she looked at the card to make sure it was the right evening, she remembered that it was at the Speaker's she had first met John, just a year ago. One year. How absurd! Five, ten, fifteen! She tried to recollect what her life could have been like before he had come into it; but it seemed to start from that point, and to have had no significance before.

"I must go out," she said again; and at that moment the door bell rang, and although Mrs. Courtenay was out, some one was admitted. The door opened, and Lord Hemsworth was announced.

There is, but men are fortunately not in a position to be aware of it, a lamentable uniformity in their manner of opening up certain subjects. Di knew in a moment from previous experience what he had come for. He wondered, as he stumbled through a labyrinth of platitudes about the weather, how he could broach the subject without alarming her. He did not know that he had done so by his manner of coming into the room, and that he had been refused before he had finished shaking hands.

Di was horribly sorry for him while he talked about—whatever he did talk about. Neither noticed what it was at the time, or remembered it afterwards. She was grateful to him for not alluding even in the most distant manner to their last meeting. She remembered that she had clung to him, and that he had called her by her Christian name, but she was too callous to be ashamed at the recollection. It was as nothing compared to another humiliation which had come upon her a little later.

"It is no good beating about the bush," said Lord Hemsworth at last, after he had beaten it till there was, so to speak, nothing left of it. "I have come up to London for one thing, and I have come here for one thing, which is—to ask you to marry me. Don't speak—don't say anything just for a moment," he continued hurriedly, raising his hand as if to ward off a rebuff. "For God's sake don't stop me. I've kept it in so long I must say it, and you must hear me."

She let him say it. And he got it out with stumbling and difficulty and long gaps between—got out in shaking commonplaces a tithe of the love he had for her. And all the time Di thought if it might only have been some one else who was uttering those halting words! (I wonder how many men have proposed and been accepted while the woman has said to herself, "If it had only been some one else!")

Despair at his inability to express himself, and at her silence, seized him: as if it mattered a pin how he expressed himself if she had been willing to listen.

"If you understood," he said over and over again, with the monotonous reiteration of a piano-tuner, "you would not refuse me. I know you are going to, but if only you understood you would not. You would not have the heart. It's—it's just everything to me." And Lord Hemsworth—oh, bathos of modern life!—looked into his hat.

"Lord Hemsworth," said Di, "have I ever given you any encouragement?"

"None," he replied. "People might think you had, but you never did. I knew better. I never misunderstood you. I know you don't care a straw about me; but—oh, Di, you have not your equal in the world. There's no woman to compare with you. I don't see how you could care for any one like me. Of course you don't. I would not expect it. But if—if you would only marry me—I would be content with very little. I've looked at it all round. I would be content with—very little."

There was a long silence.

What woman whose love has been slighted can easily reject a great devotion?

"I think," said Di, after several false starts to speak, "that if I only considered myself I would marry you; but there is the happiness of one other person to think of—yours."

"I can't have any apart from you."

"You would have none with me. If it is miserable to care for any one who is indifferent, it would be a thousand times more miserable to be married to that person."

"Not if it were you."

"Yes, if it were I."

"I would take the risk," said Lord Hemsworth, who held, in common with most men, the rooted conviction that a woman will become attached to any husband, however little she cares for her lover. It is precisely this conviction which makes the average marriages of the present day such mediocre affairs; which serves to place worldly or facile women, or those whose affections have never been called out, at the head of so many homes; as the mothers of the new generation from which we hope so much.

"I would take any risk," repeated Lord Hemsworth, doggedly. "I would rather be unhappy with you than happy with any one else."

"You think so now," said Di; "but the time would come when you would see that I had cut you off from the best thing in the world—from the love of a woman who would care for you as much as you do for me."

"I don't want her. I want you."

"I cannot marry you."

Lord Hemsworth clutched blindly at the arms of the chair.

"I would wait any time."

Di shook her head.

"Any time," he stammered. "Go away for a year, and—come back."

"It would be no good."

Then he lost his head.

"So long as you don't care for any one else," he said incoherently. "I thought at the carnival—that is why I have kept out of the way—but I met Tempest to-day at the Carlton, and—I asked him straight out, and he said there was nothing between you and him. I suppose you have refused him, like the rest of us. Oh, my God, Di, they say you have no heart! But it isn't true, is it? Don't refuse me. Don't make me live without you. I've tried for three months"—and Lord Hemsworth's face worked—"and if you knew what it was like, you wouldn't send me back to it."

Every vestige of colour had faded from Di's face at the mention of John.

"I don't care enough for you to marry you," she said, pitiless in her great pity. "I wish I did, but—I don't."

"Do you care for any one else?"

Di saw that nothing short of the truth would wrest his persistence from its object.

"Yes, I do," she said passionately, trembling from head to foot. "For some one who does not care for me. You and I are both in the same position. Do you see now how useless it is to talk of this any longer?"

Both had risen to their feet. Lord Hemsworth looked at Di's white convulsed face, and his own became as ashen. He saw at last that he had no more chance of marrying her than if she were lying at his feet in her coffin. Constancy, which can compass many things, avails nought sometimes.

"I beg your pardon," he said, holding out his hand to go.

"I think I ought to beg yours," she said brokenly, while their hands clasped tightly each in each. "I never meant to make you as—unhappy as—as I am myself, but yet I have."

They looked at each other with tears in their eyes.

"It does not matter," said Lord Hemsworth, hoarsely. "I shall be all right—it's you—I think of. Don't stand—mustn't stand—you're too tired. Good-bye."

Di flung herself down on her face on the sofa as the door closed. She had forgotten Lord Hemsworth's existence the moment after he had left the room. John had told him that there was nothing between her and himself. John had told him that. John had said that. A cry escaped her, and she strangled it in the cushion.

Hope does not always die when we imagine it does. It is subject to long trances. The hope which she had thought dead was only giving up the ghost now. "Chaque espÉrance est un oeuf d'oÙ peut sortir un serpent au lieu d'une colombe." Out of that frail shell of a cherished hope lying broken before her the serpent had crept at last. It moved, it grew before her eyes.