charming about London in April. The
parks are aglow with young green, and the trees nod cheerfully to the
little breeze that dances round them, whispering of summer. Even the
houses perk up under their spruce new coats of paint, while every
window that can afford it puts forth its carefully tended box of
flowers. It is as though the old city suddenly awoke from her winter
slumber and preened herself like a bird making its toilet; there is an
atmosphere of renewal abroad--the very carters and cabmen seem
conscious of it, and acknowledge it with good-humoured smiles and a
flower worn jauntily in the buttonhole.

Diana leaned far out of the open window of her room at Brutton Square,
sniffing up the air with its veiled, faint fragrance of spring, and
gazing down in satisfaction at the delicate shimmer of green which
clothed the trees and shrubs in the square below.

The realisation that a year had slipped away since last the trees had
worn that tender green amazed her; it seemed almost incredible that
twelve whole months had gone by since the day when she had first come
to Brutton Square, and she and Bunty had joked together about the ten
commandments on the wall.

The year had brought both pleasure and pain--as most years do--pleasure
in the friends she had gathered round her, Adrienne and Jerry and
Bunty--even with Olga Lermontof an odd, rather one-sided friendship had
sprung up, born of the circumstances which had knit their paths
together--pain in the soreness which still lingered from the hurt that
Errington had dealt her. Albeit, her life had been so filled with work
and play, her mind so much occupied, that a surface skin, as it were,
had formed over the wound, and it was only now and again that a sudden
throb reminded her of its existence. Love had brushed her with his
wings in passing, but she was hardly yet a fully awakened woman.

Nevertheless, the brief episodes of her early acquaintance with
Errington had cut deep into a mind which had hitherto reflected nothing
beyond the simple happenings of a girlhood passed at a country rectory,
and the romantic flair of youth had given their memory a certain sacred
niche in her heart. Some day Fate would come along and take them down
from that shelf where they were stored, and dust them and present them
to her afresh with a new significance.

For a brief moment Errington's kiss had roused her dormant womanhood,
and then the events of daily life had crowded round