There were times when, in the midst of that shrill Babel, the schoolroom, Diana Paget heard the summer winds sighing in the pine-woods above Forêtdechêne, and fancied herself standing once more in that classic temple on whose plastered wall Valentine had once cut her initials with his penknife in a fantastical monogram, surmounted by a death's-head and encircled by a serpent. She thought of that familiar companion very often, in spite of her juvenile pupils and the sewing-on of tapes and buttons. He had seemed to her a perpetual enigma and mystery when she was with him; and now that she was far away from him, he was more than ever an inscrutable creature. Was he altogether vile, she wondered, or was there some redeeming virtue in his nature? He had taken trouble to secure her escape from shame and disgrace, and in doing this he surely had performed a good action; but was it not just possible that he had taken this opportunity of getting rid of her because her presence was alike wearisome and inconvenient? She thought very bitterly of her fellow Bohemian when this view of his conduct presented itself to her; how heartlessly he had shuffled her off,--how cruelly he had sent her out into the hard pitiless world, to find a shelter as best she might!
"What would have become of me if Priscilla had refused to take me in?" she asked herself. "I wonder whether Mr. Hawkehurst ever considered that."
More than one letter had come to Diana from her old companion since her flight from the little Belgian watering-place. The first letter told her that her father had "tided over _that_ business, and was in better feather than before the burst-up at the Hôtel d'Orange." The letter was dated from Paris, but gave no information as to the present arrangements or future plans of the writer and his companion. Another letter, dated from the same place, but not from the same address, came to her six months afterwards, and anon another; and it was such a wonderful thing for Captain Paget to inhabit the same city for twelve months together, that Diana began to cherish faint hopes of some amendment in the scheme of her father's life and of Valentine's, since any improvement in her father's position would involve an improvement in that of his _protégé_.