ips like a cry of appeal,
tremulous and uncertain.

But Miss Lermontof made no response. She seemed quite unmoved by the
distress of the woman sitting huddled in the chair before her, and her
light green eyes shone with a curious savage glint like the eyes of a
cat.

Diana spoke again nervously.

"Are you--angry with me?"

"Angry!" The Russian almost spat out the word. "Angry! Don't you see
what you're doing?"

"What I'm doing?" repeated Diana. "What am I doing?"

Olga replied with a grim incisiveness.

"You're killing Max--that's all. This--this is going to break
him--break him utterly."

There was a long silence, and the dewy dusk of the night, shaken into
pearly mist where the flickering light of the Chinese lanterns
illumined it, seemed to close round the two women, like a filmy
curtain, shutting them off from the chattering throng in the adjoining
room.

Presently a cart rattled past in the street below, rasping the tense
silence.

Diana lifted her head.

"I didn't know!" she said helplessly. "I didn't know! . . ."

"And yet you professed to love him!" Olga spoke consideringly, an
element of contemptuous wonder in her voice.

The memory of words that Max had uttered long ago stirred in Diana's
mind.

"_You don't know what love means!_"

Limned against the darkness she could see once more the sun-warmed
beach at Culver Point, the blue, sparkling sea with the white gulls
wheeling above it, and Max--Max standing tall and straight beside her,
with a shaft of sunlight flickering across his hair, and love
illimitable in his eyes.

"You don't know what love means!"

The words penetrated to her innermost consciousness, cleaving their way
sheer through the fog of doubt and mistrust and pride as the sharp
blade of the surgeon's knife cuts deep into a festering wound. And
before their clarifying, essential truth, Diana's soul recoiled in dumb
dismay.

No, she hadn't known what love meant--love, which, with an exquisite
unreasonableness, believes when there is ground for doubt--hadn't
understood it as even this cynical, bitter-tongued Russian understood
it. And she recognised the scorn on Olga's white, contemptuous face as
the unlovely sheath of an ideal of love immeasurably beyond her own
achieving.

The vision of Culver Point faded away, and an impalpable wall of
darkness seemed to close about her. Dimly, as though it were some one
else's voice speaking, she heard herself say slowly:--