The home-coming had been hard. And perhaps the element in it she had felt most difficult to bear had been the universal sympathy with which she had been greeted. It spoke from the faces of the poor--the men and women, the lads and girls of the village; with their looks of curiosity, sometimes frank, sometimes furtive or embarrassed. It was more politely disguised in the manners and tones of the gentle people; but everywhere it was evident; and sometimes it was beyond her endurance. She could not help imagining the talk about her in her absence; the discussion of the case in the country-houses or in the village. To the village people, unused to the fine discussions which turn on motive and environment, and slow to revise an old opinion, she was just the daughter-- She covered her eyes--one hideous word ringing brutally, involuntarily, through her brain. By a kind of miserable obsession the talk in the village public-houses shaped itself in her mind. "Ay, they didn't hang her because she was a lady. She got off, trust her! But if it had been you or me--" She rose, trembling, trying to shake off the horror, walking vaguely through the garden into the fields, as though to escape it. But the horror pursued her, only in different forms. Among the educated people--people who liked dissecting "interesting" or "mysterious" crimes--there had been no doubt long discussions of Sir James Chide's letter to the _Times_, of Sir Francis Wing's confession. But through all the talk, rustic or refined, she heard the name of her mother bandied; forever soiled and dishonored; with no right to privacy or courtesy any more--"Juliet Sparling" to all the world: the loafer at the street corner--the drunkard in the tavern-- The thought of this vast publicity, this careless or cruel scorn of the big world--toward one so frail, so anguished, so helpless in death--clutched Diana many times in each day and night. And it led to that perpetual image in the mind which we saw haunting her in the first hours of her grief, as though she carried her dying mother in her arms, passionately clasping and protecting her, their faces turned to each other, and hidden from all eyes besides. Also, it deadened in her the sense of her own case--in relation to the gossip of the neighborhood. Ostrich-like, she persuaded herself that not many people could have known anything about her five days' engagement. Dear kind folk like the Roughsedges would not talk of it, nor Lady Lucy surely. And Oliver himself--never! She had reached a point in the field walk where the hill-side opened to her right, and the little winding path was disclosed which had been to her on that mild February evening the path of Paradise. She stood still a moment, looking upward, the deep sob of loss rising in her throat.