her tired face.

"I can't think of anything but that child, dancing in the candle-light.
Oh, youth, youth, Sophie; is there anything like it in the whole wide
world!"

"Diana," Sophie's voice was sharpened by her solicitude, "come away from
that mirror."

Diana obediently turned her back on her dressing table, and presently
she said, "I wonder if it was wise to have her here?"

"Bettina?"

"Yes."

Sophie was thoughtful. "I'm not sure. Yet it seemed to me to-night that
perhaps--you had been wise----"

"What made you think that?"

"Anthony's face when you played, Diana."

"Oh!" Diana crossed the room and dropped down on the rug at her friend's
feet. "Tell me how he looked," she said, softly, with her arm outflung
across the other's knees.

"It was just in a flash that I saw his face--under the search-light from
the ferry. It was the face of a man who had lost the one woman in the
world for him, Diana."

"If I could believe that," said Diana, tensely, "nothing else would
matter."

"Yet, believing it, how can it be right for him to marry some one else?"

Diana, with her chin propped between her hands, stared with wide eyes
into space. "It isn't right--but she loves him, Sophie."

"Yet she's not the one woman--oh, what a muddle, Diana."

"What a muddle," and for a time they sat in silence.

Then Sophie said, "Perhaps it's because I was so happy in my
marriage--that I can see so clearly. I've worked it out this way,
dearest, dear--that in all the world there's just one woman for one man.
If he meets and marries her, no matter how hard their life may be, they
will be drawn together, not separated, by the hardness; no matter how
the world may use them, they will cling together against the world. But
when a man marries the wrong woman, he goes through life a half-man,
crippled in mind and spirit, because of his mistake. Sometimes the man
finds the one woman in a second marriage; sometimes he finds her too
late; sometimes he is too blind to know that she is the one woman, and
he lets her go, to discover afterward that no other can fill his life.
That's the pity of it. If Anthony marries Bettina, she will know some
day--that she is--the wrong woman----"

Diana rose and moved restlessly about the room. "But she's so slim and
white and young--and no man can resist that sort of thing long. She has
youth to give him, Sophie, and I, why, soon I'll be middle-aged."

"You--oh, Diana----"

Diana's laugh had a sob