"I thought I loved him." Then, after a pause, "Will you go? Please
go. I should like to be . . . quiet . . . a little while."

For a moment Olga gazed down at her, eagerly, almost hungrily, as
though silently beseeching her. Then, still silently, she went away.

Diana sat very still. Above her, the gay-coloured Chinese lanterns
swayed to and fro in the little breeze that drifted up the street, and
above again, far off in the sombre sky, the stars looked
down--pitiless, unmoved, as they have looked down through all the ages
upon the pigmy joys and sufferings of humanity.

For the first time Diana was awake to the limitations she had set to
love.

The meeting with her husband had shaken her to the very foundations of
her being, the shock of his changed appearance sweeping away at a
single blow the whole fabric of artificial happiness that she had been
trying to build up.

She had thought that the wound in her heart would heal, that she could
teach herself to forget the past. And lo! At the first sight of his
face the old love and longing had reawakened with a strength she was
powerless to withstand.

The old love, but changed into something immeasurably more than it had
ever been before, and holding in its depths a finer understanding. And
with this clearer vision came a sudden new knowledge--a knowledge
fraught with pain and yet bearing deep within it an unutterable sense
of joy.

Max had cared all the time--cared still! It was written in the lines
of suffering on his face, in the quiet endurance of the close-shut
mouth. Despite the bitter, pitiful misunderstandings of their married
life, despite his inexplicable friendship for Adrienne, despite all
that had gone before, Diana was sure, in the light of this larger
understanding which had come to her, that through it all he had loved
her. With an absolute certainty of conviction, she knew that it was
her hand which had graved those fresh lines about his mouth, brought
that look of calm sadness to his eyes, and the realisation held a
strange mingling of exquisite joy and keen anguish.

She hid her face in her hands, hid it from the stars and the shrouding
dark, tremulously abashed at the wonderful significance of love.

She almost laughed to think how she had allowed so small a thing as the
secret which Max could not tell her to corrode and eat into the heart
of happiness. Looking back from the standpoint she had now gained, it
seemed so pitifull