Di had seen her father and Archie off on their journey to Brighton, and, having arranged to replace her brother in three days' time, was surprised when a hasty note, the morning after their departure, informed her that Archie had been recalled to London _on business_, and that she must go to her father at once. Mrs. Courtenay was incensed. Archie had shirked before, and now he had shirked again. But Colonel Tempest remained in far too precarious a condition for her to refuse to allow her granddaughter to go, as she would certainly otherwise have done. So Di went off the morning after the Speaker's party. She had told Mrs. Courtenay that she had met John there. "In one way I am glad to have met him," she said firmly, her proud lip quivering. "Any uncertainty I may have been weak enough to feel is at an end, and it was time the end should come. For, in spite of all you said, I had had a lingering idea that if we met----. And now we _have_ met--and he had evidently no wish to see me again." Mrs. Courtenay looked fixedly at the beautiful pallid face, and wondered that she had ever wished Di had a heart. "This pain will pass," she said gently. "You have always believed me, Di; believe me now. Take courage and wait. You have had an untroubled life till now. That has passed. Trouble has come. It is part of life. It will pass too; not the feeling, perhaps, but the suffering." "Good-bye, my child," she said a little later, kissing the girl's cold cheek with a tenderness which Di was powerless to return. "Take care of yourself. Go out every day; the sea air will do you good. And tell your father I cannot spare you more than a fortnight." Di would have given anything to show her grandmother that she was thankful--oh, how thankful in this grey world!--for her sympathy and love, but she had no words. She kissed Mrs. Courtenay, and went down to the cab. Mrs. Courtenay remained motionless until she heard it drive away. Then she let two tears run down from below her spectacles, and wiped them away. No more followed them. The old cannot give way like the young. Mrs. Courtenay had once said that nothing had power to touch her very nearly; but she was still vulnerable on one point. Her old heart, worn with so many troubles, ached for her granddaughter. "Thank God," she said to herself, "that in the next world there will be neither marrying nor giving in marriage. Perhaps God Almighty sees it's a mistake." Di found Colonel Tempest wrapped up in a _duvet_ in an armchair by the window of his sitting-room, in a state of equal indignation against his children for deserting him, and against the rain for blurring the seaview from the window. With his nurse, it is hardly necessary to add, he was not on speaking terms--a fact which seemed to cause that patient, apathetic person very little annoyance, she being, as she told Di, "accustomed to gentlemen."