ienne de Gervais.

Gradually she had begun to connect the two things--Adrienne, and that
secret which dwelt like a shadowy menace at the back of everything. It
was clear, too, that they were also linked together in the minds both
of Baroni and Olga Lermontof--a dropped sentence here, a hint there,
had assured her of that.

Then had come Olga's definite suggestion, "Adrienne de Gervais is a bad
friend for the man one loves!" And from that point onward Diana had
seen new meanings in all that passed between her husband and the
actress, and a blind jealousy had taken possession of her. Something
out of the past bound her husband and Adrienne together, of that she
felt convinced. She believed that the knowledge which Max had chosen
to withhold from her--his wife--he shared with Adrienne--and all
Diana's fierce young sense of possession rose up in opposition.

Last night, the sight of her husband and the actress, standing together
on the stage, had seemed to her to epitomise their relative
positions--Max and Adrienne, working together, fully in each other's
confidence, whilst she herself was the outsider, only the onlooker in
the box!

"Well?" she said, defiantly turning to her husband. "Well? What is it
you wish to say to me?"

"I want an explanation of your conduct--last night."

"And I," she retorted impetuously, "I want an explanation of your
conduct--ever since we've been married!"

He swept her demand aside as though it were the irresponsible prattle
of a child, ignored it utterly. He was conscious of only one
thing--that she had barred herself away from him, humiliated him, dealt
their mutual love a blow beneath which it reeled.

The bolted door itself counted for nothing. What mattered was that it
was she who had closed it, deliberately choosing to shut him outside
her life, and cutting every cord of love and trust and belief that
bound them together.

An Englishman might have stormed or laughed, as the mood took him, and
comforted himself with the reflection that she would "get over it."
But not so Max. The sensitiveness which he hid from the world at
large, but which revealed itself in the lines of that fine-cut mouth of
his, winced under the humiliation she had put upon him. Love, in his
idea, was a thing so delicate, so rare, that Diana's crude handling of
the situation bore for him a far deeper meaning than the impulsive,
headlong action of the over-wrought girl had rightly held. To Max, it