The stoicism of the poor rebuked her, as she thought of the sharp impatience and disappointment in which she had parted from Mrs.Colwood.
She seemed to hear her father's voice.

"No shirking, Diana! You asked her--you formed absurd and exaggerated expectations.

She is here; and she is not responsible for your expectations.

Make the best of her, and do your duty!" And eagerly the child's heart answered: "Yes, yes, papa!--dear papa!" And there, sharp in color and line, it rose on the breast of memory, the beloved face.

It set pulses beating in Diana which from her childhood onward had been a life within her life, a pain answering to pain, the child's inevitable response to the father's misery, always discerned, never understood.
This abiding remembrance of a dumb unmitigable grief beside which she had grown up, of which she had never known the secret, was indeed one of the main factors in Diana's personality.