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IN

THROUGH A NEEDLE'S EYE.

BY HESBA STRETTON, AUTHOR OF "JESSICA'S FIRST PRAYER," ETC.

CHAPTER VII.-IN DIANA'S PARLOUR.

N another quarter of an hour Justin was bidding the watch-dog be quiet, in a threatening voice that cowed the fierce animal; though he followed sniffing at the heels of the untimely visitor, and uttering a low growl as if ready to spring upon him at any moment. The front door of Rillage Grange had not been opened for years, and tall, strong plants of hemlock and mallow had grown in the chinks of the stone steps before it. But Justin was at no loss to find an entrance, without going through the large old kitchen, which had become the usual way of admission. There was a small side door sacred to Diana, which had always been open to him as long as he could remember, when he had brought messages as a boy from his stepfather to Squire Lynn. It was not locked, and he entered by it as one quite at home in the household. A long, dark passage, with a feeble oil-lamp burning dimly at one end, lay before him, and he marched along it rapidly.

He knocked at the door of a room halfway along the passage, but there was no answer, and he went in after a moment's pause. It was an old-fashioned parlour, with a low carved ceiling, and wainscoted walls. The rooms in Herford Court were not unlike it; but here the furniture was still more faded and antique, and there was an air of poverty and of painful care-taking creeping over it. Yet it abounded in flowers and ferns, and these gave a brightness of colour to the shabby room, which caught his eye pleasantly; though he hardly knew what pleased him, except that he was in Diana Lynn's parlour.

There was a fire burning cheerily on the hearth, and a lamp lit, though it was turned low, and shed only a very soft, subdued light through the place. Justin threw himself down into a large old chair, that was drawn up to the hearth, and felt all at once how worn-out and weary he was with the excitement of the last night and day. He closed his eyes, with a delicious sense of repose in the warmth and comfort of the fire-side after his toilsome walk; and he did not hear Diana return to her room some few minutes later, and after a momentary start of surprise, stand looking at him with a quiet smile.

VII. N.S.

She carried a light in her hand, and it shone fully upon her face, which was somewhat too worn and thin for her age. It was a noticeable face, with its finely-cut features and low broad forehead. Her complexion was a clear cream-colour, with no tinge of red except in her lips, while her eyes and hair were dark as night. Mrs. Fosse, the wife of old Jeremy Fosse, at Herford, a woman of few words, but of poetic instincts, said Miss Diana Lynn always made her think of the moon-light. An expression of care and sadness had grown habitual to her; but as she looked at Justin sleeping in her chair, a smile, mischievous yet shy, stole across her face. Her girlhood had passed, though a melancholy girlhood, for she was already four-and-twenty; and the reserve and stateliness of a somewhat self-contained, reticent womanhood was growing manifest in her. But just now, with her dark eyes glittering, and her lips melting into smiles, the dignity had given way to a very pleasant mirthfulness. If she laughed, her laughter would be low and sweet; but very few persons had ever heard Diana laugh.

She had scarcely paused there a minute when Justin became conscious of her presence, and started to his feet. Diana hastened forward to meet him, and offered her hand frankly, as to an old and intimate friend. He clasped it between both of his, and held it as he spoke quickly, though in a quiet voice.

"Diana, my father is dead!" he said. "I have heard of it," she replied, with a grave look up into his face; we heard of it this morning."

"And half an hour ago," continued Justin impulsively, "I was saying, would to God Diana was my wife!"

She withdrew her hand from his grasp, and sank down on the chair from which he had just risen. Her heart was beating tumultuously. Justin's well-known face bore the traces of violent agitation; and as she glanced up at him, keenly yet shyly, she could see how tremulous his lips were, and what trouble was in his eyes. He hardly looked as if he had come over the bleak cliffs that lay between them simply to declare his love for her.

"Forgive me!" he said, standing before her, and speakingly appealingly. "I hardly meant to say that to-night; certainly I never 6

meant to say it so abruptly. But I do love you, Diana, with all my heart; I want you. Now I have said it, against my better judgment, and almost against my will, what will you say to me?"

Why is it against your better judgment, and against your will?" she asked. "Because," he said regretfully, "if you will not be my wife, you will probably cease to be my friend. Don't I know I am almost, if not quite, your only friend? Your chief friend I have been. I comfort you and help you by coming here, to your miserable home. In one sense I protect you. And now if my hasty words raise a barrier between us, you will lose the full comfort of my friendship; and I shall lose you."

There was complete silence when he finished speaking. Diana had leaned her face on her hands; and he could see only the low, broad forehead, and the dark hair smoothly braided away from it, and gathered into a thick knot at the back of her small shapely head. He broke the silence after a pause full of pain to him.

"I have done you no injury, Diana," he said, in a broken voice, "but I wish I could call back those hasty words. If I tell you this once that I love you, I will never trouble you so again. I never loved a woman as I love you. I was little more than a boy when I married Pansy's mother; and you were only a child then. It is a man's deep faithful love I feel now for you; and God knows you are dearer to me than anything else in the world; ay! almost dearer than Pansy herself, and she is more precious to me than words can tell. And oh! Diana, my love for her would never clash with my love for you."

"Why did you never tell me before?" she asked in a whisper.

"Why do I tell you now?" he returned. "Because I feel like a leaf tossed to and fro; because all my life is being uprooted. I spoke in spite of myself; I had no intention of speaking of it. I only meant to come in and look at you, and hold your hand in mine for a moment, and listen to your sweet, quiet voice. I should have gone back again to my duty, feeling I had both gained and given strength. And now, like a fool, I've cut down my own poor little gourd. Diana, you will never forget this."

"No, I can never forget it," she murmured.

He was still standing before her, looking miserable and dejected. His long, dark tramp over the rough and wet paths, that

had brought him to her, had given him a weather-beaten aspect, while his want of sleep and profound conflict with difficulties, known only to himself, had already marked his face with a worn and anxious expression. She lifted up her dark eyes to him, with a strange, soft light beaming in them, and her lips melted again into a tender smile.

"I do not wish to forget it," she said very quietly. "I have always loved you, Justin.”

"I cannot believe it," cried Justin on his knees beside her, and holding her hands in his, that he might see her face, and read there whether she was mocking him or not; "tell me again, Diana. Did you say you had always loved me?"

"Why!" she said in a pleasant whisper, "who else was there? Ever since I was a little girl I've loved nobody else. You were always so good to me, Justin; and so good to every one. You are the best man I know; the best in the whole world to me. There has never been any other to me."

He could scarcely catch the last words, though her lips were so close to his ear. But as she uttered them a noisy and peremptory ring resounded through the silent house, which till that moment had seemed empty; and immediately afterwards a man's loud voice shouted impatiently along the echoing passages,

"Di! come here, Di! This moment!" "It's my father," she exclaimed, springing up hastily, "I must go at once. You will not see him to-night, Justin? and rest. Good-bye, my dear."

No; go home

He had

Her voice lingered a little over her farewell; but she was gone before he could answer, and he heard her swift, light step speeding along the passage, in obedience to her father's boisterous summons. often heard both the call and the obedient footstep before, but he had never felt chafed to the degree he did to-night. For a moment or two he stood irresolute whether to follow her into Squire Lynn's unwelcome presence, or obey her parting injunction to go home, and seek the rest which was becoming imperatively necessary. He opened the door, and caught the sound of rude laughter and loud voices issuing from the dining-room at the other end of an intersecting passage. It would be mere folly and exasperation to himself to face the riotous merriment of the half-drunken man; so, quietly letting himself out by the side-door through which he had entered, he passed again into the darkness of the night.

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CHAPTER VIII.-DIANA'S DECISION. DIANA opened the dining-room door, after hurrying away from Justin, to obey her father's call. He was still sitting at the dinner-table, with two visitors from Lowborough, who had dropped in since Diana had left her father alone after dinner. Squire Lynn's habits were well known, and it was seldom that he was without some chance companions to wile away the tedious hours until after midnight. It was his boast that he could drink as much as any man in the county if he might choose his own time for it, and begin only after having fortified himself with a good dinner, and there were few drinking men in that, or the neighbouring counties, who had not tried their powers with him.

she had left Justin less than three minutes ago. She lingered at the closed door shamefaced and irresolute; and when she opened it, and saw at a glance from under her drooping eyelids, that he was gone, she felt a momentary sense of relief, quickly followed by a chill of disappointment. Yet she was happy; happier than she could ever have imagined. She sat down in her old chair, and gazed steadily though absently into the fire. Was it real that Justin had stood before her not ten minutes ago, telling her he loved her, and saying, "Would to God she was his wife"? She had been very miserable this morning, speechlessly miserable; for how could she put her sorrow into words that would not shock herself? She had almost been tempted to doubt God's love for her; and she had thought her lot was harder than the lot of any woman whom she knew. Yet all the while He had held this priceless gift in store for her.

He was still a handsome, fine-looking man under sixty, with the same clear-cut features as his daughter. Till the last few years there had been a marked likeness between Diana hid her face in her hands, and them, to the very poise of the shapely head, sobbed thankfully. The very thought of and the erectness of the supple and slender being chosen and loved by Justin made her figure. But squire Lynn's head was less feel humble, and unworthy of so much gladerect, and his shoulders were more bent than ness. Her lot had been very different from they had been. His face had taken an un- that of other girls, different even from the healthy hue, and his eyes, which had been lives of her own brothers and sisters, who had as clear and deep as Diana's, had grown each broken away from their father and their blood-shot. At this moment he was at that dreary home, and taken their own course in stage of intoxication when the most trivial the world. Diana had never found it in her or the most solemn incident alike provokes heart to do this. "He is my father," she an uproarious laugh. As Diana opened the had often said to herself, "and there is nodoor hastily, and paused for an instant in body to care for him but me." There had some surprise at the sight of the two guests been a stanch loyalty in her soul towards of whose arrival she had been unaware, he the man to whom she stood in the relationbroke into that boisterous guffaw which had ship of daughter. Probably she did not driven Justin out of the house. "Di!" he know all his misdeeds as the world outside exclaimed, after his companions had risen did; but she knew that all respectable men and bowed obsequiously to the stately girl, and women stood aloof from him, and from but without venturing upon any other salu- her as belonging to him. Her father had tion, "I've some news for you, my little numbers of boon companions; but she had lass. Fleming here has brought it from only one friend. And that friend was the Lowborough, and it's too good to be kept till best man in all her little world; and he had morning. Guess what old Herford's done. just said that he loved her. What had she Cut off his own son with a shilling, and left done that such a man should love her? every penny to the parson!"

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After a while she sat down to her little writing-table, where she was used to write painful, pitiful letters to those brothers and sisters of hers who had strayed away into the wide world, and who had fallen mostly into. trouble. They had quitted their post in disgust, and had fallen into other troubles. Diana was the only one who had been strong enough to resist evil. She could hear her father's drunken laughter, and the shouts of his visitors echoing through the quiet house; and she paused to listen, with the

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