They were old family records which he could not bear to destroy--the honorable records of an upright race, which some day, he thought, "might be a pleasure to her." Often during the last six months of his life, it seemed to her now, in this intensity of memory, that he had been on the point of breaking the silence of a lifetime.

She recalled moments and looks of agonized effort and yearning.

But he died of a growth in the throat; and for weeks before the end speech was forbidden them, on account of the constant danger of hemorrhage.

So that Diana had always felt herself starved of those last words and messages which make the treasure of bereaved love.
Often and often the cry of her loneliness to her dead father had been the bitter cry of Andromache to Hector; "I had from thee, in dying, no memorable word on which I might ever think in the year of mourning while I wept for thee." Had there been a quarrel between her father and mother ?--or something worse ?--at which Diana's ignorance of life, imposed upon her by her upbringing, could only glance in shuddering?
She knew her mother had died at twenty-six; and that in the two years before her death Mr.
Mallory had been much away, travelling and exploring in Asia Minor.

The young wife must have been often alone.