ease keeping him ever at a distance.

"I wonder"--he regarded her with an expression of amused curiosity--"I
wonder whether you would stoop to pick up my flower if I threw one? But,
no"--he answered his own question hastily, giving her no time to
reply--"you would push it contemptuously aside with the point of your
little white slipper, and say to your crowd of admirers standing around
you: 'That flower is the gift of a man--a rough boor of a man--who was
atrociously rude to me once. I don't even value it enough to pick it
up.' Whereupon every one--quite rightly, too!--would cry shame on the
man who had dared to insult so charming a lady--probably adding that if
bad luck befell him it would be no more than he deserved! . . . And I've
no doubt he'll get his desserts," he added carelessly.

Diana felt the tears very near her eyes and her lip quivered.. This man
had the power of hurting her--wounding her to the quick--with his bitter
raillery.

When she spoke again her voice shook a little.

"You are wrong," she said, "quite wrong. I should pick up the flower
and"--steadily--"I should keep it, because it was thrown to me by a man
who had twice done me the greatest service in his power."

Once again he checked, as if by sheer force of will, a sudden eager
movement towards her.

"Would you?" he said quickly. "Would you do that? But you would be
mistaken; I should be gaining your kindness under false pretences. The
greatest service in my power would be for me to go away and never see you
again. . . . And, I can't do that--now," he added, his voice vibrating
oddly.

His eyes held her, and at the sound of that sudden note of passion in his
tone she felt some new, indefinable emotion stir within her that was half
pain, half pleasure. Her eyelids closed, and she stretched out her hands
a little gropingly, almost as if she were trying to ward away something
that threatened her.

There was appeal in the gesture--a pathetic, half-childish appeal, as
though the shy, virginal youth of her sensed the distant tumult of
awakening passion and would fain delay its coming.

She was just a frank, whole-hearted girl, knowing nothing of love and its
strange, inevitable claim, but deep within her spoke that instinct,
premonition--call it what you will--which seems in some mysterious way to
warn every woman when the great miracle of love is drawing near. It is
as though Love's shadow fell across her heart and she were afrai