ps forever. She struggled to think clearly--to raise
some barrier between his awakened passion and her own wild desire to
take what the gods had placed within easy reach of her hand.

Suddenly she found herself speaking. Her throat was dry and she was
shaking from head to foot. But she was telling him that she had tried to
use common sense. That she had asked Bettina to come to her hoping that
there might be found some way out. But there _wasn't_ any way out, not
any honorable way. And she didn't dare play Fate any longer. Not after
to-night. Not after--_to-night_.

Her voice broke.

"Diana--dear girl----"

He put both of his strong hands on her shoulders, and so they faced each
other in the illumined night.

"For just one little moment," he said, "we will have the truth. If I had
not asked Betty you would have married me, Diana?"

"Yes."

"If there is any honorable way in which I can release myself, will you
marry me now?"

She had a sudden vision of the slender, lonely child in shabby black as
she had first seen her in the shadowy room.

"No, oh, _no_," she whispered.

"Why not?"

"Because there isn't any honorable way; because I should feel little and
mean; because it would make me think less--of you, Anthony."

Her eyes met his steadily. She was as pale as the spectral lilacs, whose
perfume floated about them. But her nervous fears were gone. She knew
now that they would triumph--she and Anthony--that they were not to
leave the heights.

When at last he spoke, it was in a moved voice. "If you were less than
you are I should not love you so much. You know that, Diana?"

"Yes, I know----"

"In the years to come, what you have been to me will be my light--in the
darkness----"

Unable to speak, she held out her hands to him. He took them, and bent
his head.

With a little murmured cry she released herself, and flitted away into
the engulfing darkness. The echoes of her swift descent came whispering
up the stairs; in the distance a door was shut. The emptiness of the
unfinished house seemed symbolic of the future which stretched before
him.

CHAPTER IX

THE GOLDEN AGE

Justin Ford had not been unsuccessful with women. Many of them had liked
him, and might have loved him if he had cared to make them, but until he
met Bettina Dolce he had not cared.

There was about Bettina, however, a certain remoteness which puzzled
him. She responded to his advances with girlish gayety, but her cool