usual.

"Well?" queried Max, reading the doubt in Diana's eyes.

"I'm afraid I couldn't engage any one else to accompany me," she said
at last. "You see, Olga is Baroni's chosen accompanist, and--it might
make trouble."

A curious expression crossed his face.

"Yes," he agreed slowly. "It might--make trouble, as you say. Well,
why not ask Joan to stay with you for a time--to counterbalance
matters?"

"Excellent suggestion!" exclaimed Diana, her spirits going up with a
bound. Joan was always so satisfactory and cheerful and commonplace
that she felt as though her mere presence in the house would serve to
dispel the vague, indefinable atmosphere of suspicion that seemed
closing round her. "I'll write to her at once."

"Yes, do. If she can come next month, she will be here for the first
night of 'Mrs. Fleming's Husband.'"

Diana went away to write her letter, while Max remained pacing
thoughtfully up and down the room, tapping restlessly with his fingers
on his chest as he walked. His face showed signs of fatigue--the hard
work in connection with the production of his play was telling on
him--and since the brief interview with his wife, a new look of
anxiety, an alert, startled expression, had dawned in his eyes.

He seemed to be turning something over in his mind as he paced to and
fro. At last, apparently, he came to a decision.

"I'll do it," he said aloud. "It's a possible chance of silencing her."

He made his way downstairs, pausing at the door of the library, where
Diana was poring over her letter to Joan.

"I find I must go out again," he said. "But I shall be back in time
for dinner."

Diana looked up in dismay.

"But you've had no tea, Max," she protested.

"Can't stay for it now, dear."

He dropped a light kiss on her hair and was gone, while Diana, flinging
down her pen, exclaimed aloud:--

"It's that woman again! I know it is! She's rung him up!"

And it never dawned upon her that the fact that she had unthinkingly
referred to Adrienne de Gervais as "that woman" marked a turning-point
in her attitude towards her.

Meanwhile Errington hailed a taxi and directed the chauffeur to drive
him to 24 Brutton Square, where he asked to see Miss Lermontof.

He was shown into the big and rather gloomy-looking public
drawing-room, of which none of Mrs. Lawrence's student-boarders made
use except when receiving male visitors, much preferring the cheery
comfort of their own bed-sitting-ro