Diana, with a sudden catching of the breath, envisaged possibilities of which no rational being of full age who reads a newspaper can be unaware.
Then, with an inward passion of denial, she shook the whole nightmare from her.

Outrage!--treason!--to those helpless memories of which she was now the only guardian.

In these easy, forgetting days, when the old passions and endurances look to us either affected or eccentric, such a life, such an exile as her father's, may seem strange even--so she accused herself--to that father's child.

But that is because we are mean souls beside those who begot us.

We cannot feel as they; and our constancy, compared to theirs, is fickleness.
So, in spirit, she knelt again beside her dead, embracing their cold feet and asking pardon.
The tears clouded her eyes; she wandered blindly on through the wood till she was conscious of sudden light and space.