a Mrs. Samuels, reluctant to venture beyond her own front door.
I must leave here, she thought, looking from the small churchyard to the narrow village street with its facing rows of stone cottages. All was brown and gray and black; there was no color anywhere. She had never learned to love the harsh landscapes of Yorkshire, a failing, no doubt. But where could she go?
Diana felt a sudden sharp longing for laughter and the sounds of a room full of people. Wistfully she remembered her short time at school. Her father had kept her there less than a year, concluding that she was being corrupted by association with fifty empty-headed girls. Diana recalled their chatter and jokes as part of the happiest time in her life. If only she could return to that time! But her new financial independence would not give her this, however pleasant it might be.
Briefly she was filled with bitterness. It seemed a cruel joke that she should get her fortune now, when events had rendered her incapable of enjoying it. She could buy a different house, hire a companion, enliven her wardrobe, but she could not regain her old lightheartedness or her girlhood friends. If only her father had been kinder, or Gerald… But with this thought, Diana shook her head. She could not honestly blame them for her present plight. Her father had been harsh and distant; Gerald had treated her shamefully. But she herself had repulsed the world in her first remorseful reaction, for no reason that the world could see. Naturally, those she rejected had withdrawn, and it seemed to her now that she had been foolish in this as well as in her rash elopement.
Gathering her cloak, Diana turned and walked through the churchyard gate and along the street toward home. Her father’s house, hers now, was beyond the edge of the village, surrounded by high stone walls. As she approached it, Diana walked more slowly, a horror of retreating behind those barriers again growing in her. Was she fated to spoil her life? Had some dark destiny hovered over her birth?
“Diana. Diana Gresham,” called a high, light voice behind her. “Wait, Diana!”
She turned. A small slender woman in a gray cloak and a modish hat was waving from a carriage in the center of the village. Her face was in shadow, and Diana did not recognize her as she got out and hurried forward.
“Oh, lud,” the newcomer gasped as she came up. “This wind takes my breath away. And I had forgotten the dreadful cold here. But how fortunate to meet you, Diana! Cynthia Addison said you had left Yorkshire, and so I might not even have called! Are you back for a visit, as we are?”
When the woman spoke, Diana recognized Amanda Trent, a friend she had not seen for eight years. Amanda, two years older, had married young and followed her soldier husband to Spain. They had exchanged one or two letters at the beginning, but Amanda was an unreliable correspondent, and Diana had ceased to write after her elopement, as she had ceased to see acquaintances like Cynthia Addison, who could not be blamed for thinking her gone. “Hello, Amanda,” she answered, the commonplace words feeling odd on her tongue.
Amanda peered up into her face, sensing some strangeness. She looked just the same, Diana thought—tiny and brunette, with huge almost black eyes. Those eyes had been the downfall of a number of young men before Captain Trent won her hand. “Diana?” Amanda said, a question in her voice.
Making a great effort, Diana replied, “I am not visiting. I never left. After Papa died…” She didn’t finish her sentence because the story seemed far too complicated to review; none of the important things could be told. And she didn’t want pity.
Amanda held out both hands. “Yes, they told me about Mr. Gresham. I am sorry, of course, though…” She shrugged. Long ago, Diana had confided some of her trials.
Awkwardly Diana took her hands. Amanda squeezed her fingers and smiled. “Come back with me, and we shall have a cozy talk. I want to hear everything!”
Diana wondered what she would say if she did. Amanda seemed the same gay creature she had been at nineteen; she felt ancient beside her. Yet the chance to put off going home was irresistible, and shortly they were sitting side by side in Amanda’s carriage riding toward her parents’ house a few miles from the village.
“George is invalided out,” Amanda told her. “He