Muriel Colwood had at once perceived it; Marsham had been sometimes puzzled by the signs of it.
To-day--because of Fanny and this toppling of her dreams--the dark mood, to which Diana was always liable, had descended heavily upon her.

She had no sooner rebuked it--by the example of the poor, or the remembrance of her father's long patience--than she was torn by questions, vehement, insistent, full of a new anguish.
Why had her father been so unhappy?
What was the meaning of that cloud under which she had grown up?
She had repeated to Muriel Colwood the stock explanations she had been accustomed to give herself of the manner and circumstances of her bringing-up.

To-day they seemed to her own mind, for the first time, utterly insufficient.

In a sudden crash and confusion of feeling it was as though she were tearing open the heart of the past, passionately probing and searching.
Certain looks and phrases of Fanny Merton were really working in her memory.

They were so light--yet so ugly.