It pained him that her foot should be insecure in the world. True, by his testament he protected her future with every affluence, yet he must know that with his death consideration would forsake her, and so clung feverishly to life. ’Twas not until one day he came unexpectedly upon a little book wherein she writ her private thoughts (’tis to this I referred in my second chapter) that he could believe her unwounded by darts he could not shield her from. They read it together, her cheek against his, and he was the more easy because she expressed therein the most unclouded contentment, and he never guessed ’twas writ for his reading. Did I not say—such a woman can’t tell the whole truth if she would? But the crowning pain to both was when his first-born son was put in his arms,—the child that should have carried on the pride of his house and been the glory of his own declining years, and yet was nothing. He took it in his arms with a tenderness and pain inexpressible—the more so that to the lovely mother he must show nothing but gladness. Diana wept to see them thus. Who shall disentangle grief and joy in a case so singular? It is certain that those who censured might hold that hour a punishment sufficient for the two, if punishment they deserved. Would the child himself judge his parents one day? That also might come. Her thoughts of this she writ not in her book, but locked them in her own bosom. So four years went by, and instead of wearying them, each day drew them nearer. ’Twas in France the news reached them that changed their life once more. ’Twas brought by a mounted messenger riding hard from the English Ambassador in Paris and reached the Duke late at night while Diana slept upstairs, the child beside her. Little knowing its content, he opened and read. “Her Grace the Duchess of Bolton died Wednesday was a week. Inform his Grace that he may return as is necessary.” He read again and, folding it, slipped it into his breast, and went up the stair to the great room curtained with velvet and a dim light burning in a silver lamp beside the bed. She lay there in the sweetest sleep, the image of youth and innocence, one soft hand flung out over her child that slept in a bed beside her, the other across her breast. Some happy thought passed through her dreaming mind as he stood looking down, for a smile flitted across her lips and vanished leaving its pleasure behind it. Indeed for all her twenty-two years she seemed but a child herself, save for the attitude maternal of the guarding hand. The two pulled at his heart-strings now he was at the moment of decision whether to cut the bond, to leave things as they were, or to make them his own irrevocably. Stooping, he kissed her on the cheek as light as her own smile. Drowsily she woke, as held in the arms of content,—he could see the glimmer of her waking eyes through the dark lashes. Almost before they opened her arm was about his neck—as he knelt beside her.