Fanny looked haughtily round the table. How many of them knew what she knew? Suddenly a name recurred to her!--the name announced by the butler and repeated by Mr. Birch. At the moment she had been thinking of other things; it had roused no sleeping associations. But now the obscure under-self sent it echoing through the brain. Fanny caught her breath. The sudden excitement made her head swim.--She turned and looked at the white-haired elderly man sitting between her and Diana. Sir James Chide! Memories of the common gossip in her home, of the talk of the people on the steamer, of pages in that volume of _Famous Trials_ she had studied on the voyage with such a close and unsavory curiosity danced through the girl's consciousness. Well, _he_ knew! No good pretending there. And he came to see Diana--and still Diana knew nothing! Mrs. Colwood must simply be telling lies--silly lies! Fanny glanced at her with contempt. Yet so bewildered was she that when Sir James addressed her, she stared at him in what seemed a fit of shyness. And when she began to talk it was at random, for her mind was in a tumult. But Sir James soon divined her. Vulgarity, conceit, ill-breeding--the great lawyer detected them in five minutes' conversation. Nor were they unexpected; for he was well acquainted with Miss Fanny's origins. Yet the perception of them made the situation still more painfully interesting to him, and no less mysterious than before. For he saw no substantial change in it; and he was, in truth, no less perplexed than Fanny. If certain things had happened in consequence of Miss Merton's advent, neither he nor any other guest would be sitting at Diana Mallory's table that day; of that he was morally certain. Therefore, they had not happened. He returned with a redoubled tenderness of feeling to his conversation with Diana. He had come to Overton for the Sunday, at great professional inconvenience, for nothing in the world but that he must pay this visit to Beechcote; and he had approached the house with dread--dread lest he should find a face stricken with the truth. That dread was momentarily lifted, for in those beautiful dark eyes of Diana innocence and ignorance were still written; but none the less he trembled for her; he saw her as he had seen her at Tallyn, a creature doomed, and consecrate to pain. Why, in the name of justice and pity, had her father done this thing? So it is that a man's love, for lack of a little simple courage and common-sense, turns to cruelty.