She had fits of despondency now and then, even in the midst of her duties, and was apt to fall into a sombre reverie over one of the abridgments, whereby she was neglectful of her pupils' aspirates, and allowed Henry the Second to be made the poorer by the loss of an H, or Heliogabalus to be described by a name which that individual himself would have failed to recognise.
There were times when, in the midst of that shrill Babel, the schoolroom, Diana Paget heard the summer winds sighing in the pine-woods above Foretdechene, and fancied herself standing once more in that classic temple on whose plastered wall Valentine had once cut her initials with his penknife in a fantastical monogram, surmounted by a death's-head and encircled by a serpent.

She thought of that familiar companion very often, in spite of her juvenile pupils and the sewing-on of tapes and buttons.

He had seemed to her a perpetual enigma and mystery when she was with him; and now that she was far away from him, he was more than ever an inscrutable creature.

Was he altogether vile, she wondered, or was there some redeeming virtue in his nature?
He had taken trouble to secure her escape from shame and disgrace, and in doing this he surely had performed a good action; but was it not just possible that he had taken this opportunity of getting rid of her because her presence was alike wearisome and inconvenient?
She thought very bitterly of her fellow Bohemian when this view of his conduct presented itself to her; how heartlessly he had shuffled her off,--how cruelly he had sent her out into the hard pitiless world, to find a shelter as best she might! "What would have become of me if Priscilla had refused to take me in ?" she asked herself.

"I wonder whether Mr.Hawkehurst ever considered that." * * * * * More than one letter had come to Diana from her old companion since her flight from the little Belgian watering-place.