The one subject upon which neither dared to be frank, was their love the one for the other. Each was the very soul of honour, and each felt bound by their mutual compact to hide from the other how infinitely more their marriage had meant than they had ever dreamed it could, or intended it should, mean. * * * * * With the awakening of her love for David, Diana passed through agonies of shame at the recollection of the crude, calm way in which she had asked him to marry her. During the long days before the arrival of his first letter, she used, almost every evening, to stand as she had stood that afternoon, facing the empty chair which had then held David; and, whispering the fateful words recall his face of protest; his look of horrified dismay. This was the penance she imposed on her proud spirit; and she would creep upstairs afterwards, her fair head bowed in shame; a beautiful Godiva, who had ridden forth, not to save her townspeople, but to gain her own desired ends. Poor David! How he had leapt up in instant protest: "I cannot do this thing!" Her suggestion to him had not even partaken of the nature of a royal proposal of marriage, when the young man knows that the choice has fallen upon himself, and stands waiting, with ready penknife, to slit the breast of his tightly buttoned tunic, and insert therein the fair white rose of a maiden's proffered love. David's uniform of amazed manhood, had provided no improvised buttonhole for Diana's undesired flower. He had stood before her, dismayed but implacable: "I cannot do this thing!" Poor David, in his shabby jacket, with his thin, worn face, and eyes ablaze. Diana cowered before the Peeping Tom of her own vivid remembrance. But, with the reading of his first letter, the words, "my dear wife," stole around her as protective arms, shielding her from shame, and comforting her in her loneliness, with the fact of how much she had, after all, been able to give him. Yet never--never--must word from her reveal to David that she had given him, unasked, the whole love of her woman's heart. Should he come to need it, and ask for it, he would find it had all along been his. At first, Diana's life had moved along its accustomed lines; with David, and all he was to her, as a sweet central secret, hidden deeply in her heart of hearts. But, before long, she began to experience that which has been beautifully described as "the expulsive power of a new affection." David--like the little leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal--David, working outward, from that inner shrine, leavened her whole life. He had not asked her to give up hunting, or dancing, or any of the gaiety in which she delighted. Yet the more she lived in touch with his strenuous life of earnest self-sacrifice, the less these things attracted her.