inking dreamily of that day, nearly eighteen months ago, when
she had been sitting in the self-same place, leaning against the
self-same rock, whilst a grey waste of water crept hungrily up to her
very feet, threatening to claim her as its prey. And then Errington
had come, and straightway all the danger was passed.

Looking back, it seemed as though that had always been the way of
things. Some menace had arisen, either by land or sea--or even, as at
her recital, out of the very intensity of feeling which her singing had
inspired--and immediately Max had intervened and the danger had been
averted.

She laid her hand caressingly on the sun-warmed surface of the rock.
How many things had happened since she had last leaned against its
uncomfortable excrescences! She felt quite affectionately towards it,
as one who has journeyed far may feel towards some old landmark of his
youth which he finds unaltered on his return, from wandering in strange
lands. The immutability of _things_, as compared with the constant
fluctuation of life and circumstance, struck her poignantly. Here was
this rock--cast up from the bowels of the earth thousands of years ago
and washed by the waves of a million tides--still unchanged and
changeless, while, for her, the face of the whole world had altered in
little more than a year!

From a young girl-student, one insignificant person among scores of
others similarly insignificant, she had become a prominent personality,
some one in whom even the great, busy, hurrying world paused to take an
interest, and of whom the newspapers wrote eulogistic notices,
heralding her as the coming English _prima donna_. She felt rather
like a mole which has been working quietly in the dark, tunnelling a
passage for itself, unseen and unsuspected, and which has suddenly
emerged above the surface of the earth, much to its own--and every one
else's--astonishment!

Then, too, how utterly changed were her relations with Max Errington!
At the beginning of their acquaintance he had held himself deliberately
aloof, but since that evening at Adrienne de Gervais' house, when they
had formed a compact of friendship, he had, apparently, completely
blotted out from his mind the remembrance of the obstacle, whatever it
might be, which he had contended must render any friendship between
them out of the question.

And during these last few months Diana had gradually come to know the
lofty strain of idealism which ran thro