suddenly found you
cared for someone else more than Meryl?"

She was watching him closely, and she saw the swift, tell-tale blood
rush to his face.

"I'm sure I don't know," he answered, with a forced, unnatural laugh.
"It is rather a remote probability now."

"O, one never knows!..." Diana spoke with assumed lightness, and
looked away to the hills, feeling a little unnerved by the sudden,
swift palpitating in her blood. "Shall we go on now?" rising and
turning her back to him. "I mustn't keep you any longer from that
important engagement."

She might have added that she had learnt what she came out to learn;
but instead she put her horse to a smart gallop, and rode back without
scarcely speaking, flinging him a gay good-bye over her shoulder when
their roads separated.

When she reached home she found Meryl surrounded by dressmakers, and
trying hard to assume an interest in the proceedings; but Diana's
clear eyes saw the effort as plainly as if it had been written across
her forehead. She saw that she looked ill, too; ill and worn and
joyless, as if something had damped for ever her natural fount of
gaiety. And withal she was so sweet-tempered and considerate, studying
everybody else's feelings in this wedding of hers; everyone's
apparently except her own. Diana wanted to shake her one moment, and
howl round her neck the next. Instead of doing either she was a little
more snappy than usual.

"Will you have your dress fitted now?" Meryl asked her. "Madame has it
all ready."

"No," shortly. "I haven't time this morning; and besides, one can't be
fitted just after a ride. I'm going to have a hot bath and a
cigarette," and she flung out of the room, leaving Meryl a little
perplexed and Madame considerably perturbed.

In her own apartment she tossed things about, and was very irritable
with her maid. Later, she went out into the garden to a shady nook
where she was not likely to be disturbed, because she wanted to think.
But thinking was no easy matter. On every side were perplexities.

"It's just the devil's own mess," she summed up at last, unable to
think of any other sufficiently strong description. "Meryl doesn't
want to marry van Hert, and van Hert doesn't want to marry Meryl; they
both want to marry someone else; and yet they both mean to go on to
the bitter end, because of some rotten-cotton notion about serving
South Africa. O! I've no patience with these heroic attitudes! They
are not suited to common