THE YOUNG DIANA

MARIE CORELLI

THE YOUNG DIANA
AN EXPERIMENT OF THE FUTURE

BY
MARIE CORELLI

AUTHOR OF “THE LIFE EVERLASTING,” “INNOCENT,” “ROMANCE OF TWO WORLDS,” “BARABBAS,” ETC.

TORONTO
WILLIAM BRIGGS

Copyright, Canada, 1918,
By Marie Corelli

THE YOUNG DIANA

THE YOUNG DIANA

CHAPTER I

Once upon a time, in earlier and less congested days of literary effort, an Author was accustomed to address the Public as “Gentle Reader.” It was a civil phrase, involving a pretty piece of flattery. It implied three things: first, that if the Reader were not “gentle,” the Author’s courtesy might persuade him or her to become so—secondly, that criticism, whether favourable or the reverse, might perhaps be generously postponed till the reading of the book was finished,—and thirdly, that the Author had no wish to irritate the Reader’s feelings, but rather sought to prepare and smooth the way to a friendly understanding. Now I am at one with my predecessors in all these delicate points of understanding, and as I am about to relate what every person of merely average intelligence is likely to regard as an incredible narrative, I think it as well to begin politely, in the old-fashioned “grand” manner of appeal, which is half apologetic, and half conciliatory. “Gentle Reader,” therefore, I pray you to be friends with me! Do not lose either patience or temper while following the strange adventures of a very strange woman,—though in case you should be disappointed in seeking for what you will not find, let me say at once that my story is not of the Sex Problem type. No! My heroine is not perverted from the paths of decency and order, or drawn to a bad end; in fact, I cannot bring her to an end at all, as she is still very much alive and doing uncommonly well for herself. Any end for Diana May would seem not only incongruous, but manifestly impossible.

Life, as we all know, is a curious business. It is like a stage mask with two faces,—the one comic, the other tragic. The way we look at it depends on the way it looks at us. Some of us have seen it on both sides, and are neither edified nor impressed.

Then, again—life is a series of “sensations.” We who live now are always describing life. They who lived long ago did the same. It seems that none of us have ever found, or can ever find, anything better to occupy ourselves withal. All through the ages the millions of human creatures who once were born and who are now dead, passed their time on this planet in experiencing “sensations,” and relating their experiences to one another, each telling his or her little “tale of woe” in a different way. So anxious were they, and so anxious are we, to explain the special and individual manner in which our mental and physical vibrations respond to the particular circumstances in which we find ourselves, that all systems of religion, government, science, art and philosophy have been, and are, evolved simply and solely out of the pains and pleasures of a mass of atoms who are “feeling” things and trying to express their feelings to each other. These feelings they designate by various lofty names, such as “faith,” “logic,” “reason,” “opinion,” “wisdom,” and so forth; and upon them they build temporary fabrics of Law and Order, vastly solid in appearance, yet collapsible as a house of cards, and crumbling at a touch, while every now and again there comes a sudden, unlooked-for interruption to their discussions and plans—a kind of dark pause and suggestion of chaos, such as a great war, a plague or other unwelcome “visitation of God,” wherein “feelings” almost cease, or else people are too frightened to talk about them. They are chilled into nervous silence and wait, afflicted by fear and discouragement, till the cloud passes and the air clears. Then the perpetual buzz of “feeling” begins again in the mixed bass and treble of complaint and rejoicing,—a kind of monotonous noise without harmony. External Nature has no part in it, for Man is the only creature that ever tries to explain the phenomena of existence. It is not in the least comprehensible why he alone should thus trouble and perplex himself,—or why his incessant consideration and analysis of his own emotions should be allowed to go on,—for, whatsoever education may do for us, we shall never be educated out of the sense of our own importance. Which is an odd fact, moving many thoughtful minds to never-ending wonder.

My heroine, Diana May, wondered. She was always wondering. She spent weeks, and months, and years, in a chronic state of wonder. She wondered about herself and several other people, because she thought both herself and those several other people so absurd. She found no use for herself in the general scheme of things, and tried, with much patient humility, to account for herself. But though she read books on science, books on psychology, books on natural and spiritual law, and studied complex problems of evolution and selection of species till her poor dim eyes grew dimmer, and the “lines from nose to chin” became ever longer and deeper, she could discover no way through the thick bog of her difficulties. She was an awkward numeral in a sum; she did not know why she came in or how she was to be got out.

Her father and mother were what are called “very well-to-do-people,” with a pleasantly suburban reputation for respectability and regular church attendance. Mr. James Polydore May,—this was his name in full, as engraved on his visiting card—was a small man in stature, but in self-complacency the biggest one alive. He had made a considerable fortune in a certain manufacturing business which need not here be specified, and he had speculated with it in a shrewd and careful manner which was not without a touch of genius, the happy result being that he had always gained and never lost. Now at the age of sixty, he was free from all financial care, and could rattle gold and silver in his trousers-pockets with a sense of pleasure in their clinking sound,—they had the sweetness of church-bells which proclaim the sure nearness of a prosperous town. He was not a bad-looking little veteran,—he had, as he was fond of saying of himself, “a good chest measurement,” and though his legs were short, they were not bandy. Inclined to corpulence, the two lower buttons of his waistcoat were generally left undone, that he might the more easily stretch himself after a full meal. His physiognomy was not so much intelligent as pugnacious—his bushy eyebrows, hair and moustache gave him at certain moments the look of an irascible old terrier. He had keen small eyes, coming close to the bridge of a rather pronounced Israelitish nose, and to these characteristics was added a generally assertive air,—an air which went before him like an advancing atmosphere, heralding his approach as a “somebody”—that sort of atmosphere which invariably accompanies nobodies. His admiration of the fair sex was open and not always discreet, and from his youth up he had believed himself capable of subjugating any and every woman. He had an agreeable “first manner” of his own on introduction,—a manner which was absolutely deceptive, giving no clue to the uglier side of his nature. His wife could have told whole stories about this “first manner” of his, had she not long ago given up the attempt to retain any hold on her own individuality. She had been a woman of average intelligence when she married him,—commonplace, certainly, but good-natured and willing to make the best of everything; needless to say that the illusions of youth vanished with the first years of wedded life (as they are apt to do), and she had gradually sunk into a flabby condition of resigned nonentity, seeing there was nothing else left for her. The dull, tame tenor of her days had once been interrupted by the birth of her only child Diana, who as long as she was small and young, and while she was being educated under the usual system of governesses and schools, was an object of delight, affection, amusement and interest, and who, when she grew up and “came out” at eighteen as a graceful, pretty girl of the freshest type of English beauty, gave her mother something to love and to live for,—but alas!—Diana had proved the bitterest of all her disappointments. The “coming-out” business, the balls, the race-meetings and other matrimonial traps had been set in vain;—the training, the music, the dancing, the “toilettes”—had failed to attract,—and Diana had not married. She had fallen in love, as most girls do before they know much about men,—and she had engaged herself to an officer with “expectations” for whom, with a romantic devotion as out of date as the poems of Chaucer, she had waited for seven long years in a resigned condition of alarming constancy,—and then, when his “expectations” were realised, he had promptly thrown her over for a fairer and younger partner. By that time Diana was what is called “getting on.” All this had tried the temper of Mrs. James Polydore May considerably—and she took refuge from her many vexations in the pleasures of the table and the consolations of sleep. The result of this mode of procedure was that she became corpulent and unwieldy,—her original self was swallowed up in a sort of featherbed of adipose tissue, from which she peered out on the world with protruding, lustreless eyes, the tip of her small nose seeming to protest feebly against the injustice of being well-nigh walled from sight between the massive flabby cheeks on either side of its never classic and distinctly parsimonious proportions. With oversleep and over-eating she had matured into a stupid and somewhat obstinate woman, with a habit of saying unmeaningly nice or nasty things:—she would “gush” affectionately to all and sundry,—to the maid who fastened her shoes as ardently as to a friend of many years standing,—yet she would mock her own guests behind their backs, or unkindly criticise the physical and mental defects of the very man or woman she had flattered obsequiously five minutes before. So that she was not exactly a “safe” acquaintance,—you never knew where to have her. But,—as is often the case with these placidly smiling, obese ladies,—everyone seemed to be in a conspiracy to call her “sweet,” and “dear” and “kind,” whereas in very truth she was one of the most selfish souls extant. Her charities were always carefully considered and bestowed in quarters where she was likely to get most credit for them,—her profusely expressed sympathy for other people’s troubles exhausted itself in a few moments, and she would straightway forget what form of loss or misfortune she had just been commiserating,—while, despite her proverbial “dear” and “sweet” attributes, she had a sulky temper which would hold her in its grip for days, during which time she would neither speak nor be spoken to. Her chief interest and attention were centred on eatables, and she always made a point of going to breakfast in advance of her husband, so that she might select for herself the most succulent morsels out of the regulation dish of fried bacon, before he had a chance to look in. Husband and wife were always arguing with each other, and both were always wrong in each other’s opinion. Mrs. James Polydore May considered her worser half as something of a wayward and peevish child, and he in turn looked upon her as a useful domestic female—“perfectly simple and natural,” he was wont to say, a statement which, if true, would have been vastly convenient to him as he could then have deceived her more easily. But “deeper than ever plummet sounded” was the “simplicity” wherewith Mrs. James Polydore May was endowed, and the “natural” way in which she managed to secure her own comfort, convenience and ease while assuming to be the most guileless and unselfish of women; indeed there were times when she was fairly astonished at herself for having “arranged things so cleverly,” as she expressed it. Whenever a woman of her type admits to having “arranged things cleverly” you may be sure that the most astute lawyer alive could never surpass her in the height or the depth of duplicity.

Such, briefly outlined, were the characteristics of the couple who, in an absent-minded moment, had taken upon themselves the responsibility of bringing a woman into the world for whom apparently the world had no use. Woman, considered in the rough abstract, is only the pack-mule of man,—his goods, his chattels, created specially to be the “vessel” of his passion and humour,—and without his favour and support she is by universal consent set down as a lonely and wandering mistake. Such is the Law and the Prophets. Under these circumstances, which have recently shown signs of yielding to pressure, Diana, the rapidly ageing spinster daughter of Mr. and Mrs. James Polydore May, was in pitiable plight. No man wanted her, not even to serve him as a pack-mule. No man sought to add her person to his goods and chattels, and at the time this true story opens, she was not fair or fascinating or young enough to serve him as a toy for his delight, a plaything of his pleasure. Life had been very monotonous for her since she had passed the turning-point of thirty years,—“nice” people, who always say nasty things, remarked “how passée she was getting,”—thereby helping the ageing process considerably. She, meanwhile, bore her lot with exemplary cheerfulness,—she neither grizzled nor complained, nor showed herself envious of youth or youthful loveliness. A comforting idea of “duty” took possession of her mind, and she devoted herself to the tenderest care of her fat mother and irritable father, waiting upon them like a slave, and saying her prayers for them night and morning as simply as a child, without the faintest suspicion that they were past praying for. The years went on, and she took pains to educate herself in all that might be useful,—she read much and thought more,—she mastered two or three languages, and spoke them with ease and fluency, and she was an admirable musician. She had an abundance of pretty light-brown hair, and all her movements were graceful, but alas!—the unmistakable look of growing old was stamped upon her once mobile features,—she had become angular and flat-chested, and the unbecoming straight line from waist to knee, which gave her figure a kind of pitiful masculinity, was developing with hard and bony relentlessness. One charm she had, which she herself recognised and took care to cultivate—“a low, sweet voice, an excellent thing in woman.” If one chanced to hear her speaking in an adjoining room, the effect was remarkable,—one felt that some exquisite creature of immortal youth and tenderness was expressing a heavenly thought in music.

Mr. James Polydore May, as I have already ventured to suggest, was nothing if not respectable. He was a J.P. This,—in English suburban places at least,—is the hall-mark of an unimpeachable rectitude. Another sign of his good standing and general uprightness was, that at stated seasons he always went for a change of air. We all know that the person who remains in one place the whole year round is beyond the pale and cannot be received in the best society. Mr. May had a handsome house and grounds in the close vicinity of Richmond, within easy distance of town, but when the London “season” ended, he and Mrs. May invariably discovered their home to be “stuffy,” and sighed for more expansive breathing and purer oxygen than Richmond could supply. They had frequently taken a shooting or fishing in Scotland, but that was in the days when there were still matrimonial hopes for Diana, and when marriageable men could be invited, not only to handle rod and gun, but to inspect their “one ewe-lamb,” which they were over-anxious to sell to the highest bidder. These happy dreams were at an end. It was no longer worth while to lay in extensive supplies of whisky and cigars by way of impetus to timid or hesitating Benedicts, when they came back from a “day on the moors,” tired, sleepy and stupid enough to drift into proposals of marriage almost unconsciously. Mr. May seldom invited young men to stay with him now, for the very reason that he could not get them; they found him a “bore,”—his wife dull, and his daughter an “old maid,”—a term of depreciation still freely used by the golden youth of the day, despite the modern and more civil term of “lady bachelor.” So he drew in the horns of his past ambition, and consoled himself with the society of two or three portly men of his own age and habits,—men who played golf and billiards, and who, if they could do nothing else, smoked continuously. And for the necessary “change of air,” the seaside offered itself as a means of health without too excessive an expenditure, and instead of “chasing the wild deer and following the roe,” a simple hammock chair on the sandy beach, and a golf course within easy walking distance provided sufficient relaxation. Not that Mr. May was in any sense parsimonious; he did not take a cottage by the sea, or cheap lodgings,—on the contrary, he was always prepared to “do the thing handsomely,” and to select what the house-agents call an “ideal” residence.

At the particular time I am writing of, he had just settled down for the summer in a very special “ideal” on the coast of Devon. It was a house which had formerly belonged to an artist, but the artist had recently died, and his handsome and not inconsolable widow stated that she found it dull. She was glad to let it for two or three months, in order to “get away” with that restless alacrity which distinguishes so many people who find anything better than their own homes, and Mr. and Mrs. Polydore May, though, as they said, it certainly was “a little quiet after London,” were glad to have it, at quite a moderate rental for the charming place it really was. The gardens were exquisitely laid out and carefully kept; the smooth velvety lawns ran down almost to the sea, where a little white gate opened out from the green of the grass to the gold of the sand,—the rooms were tastefully furnished, and Diana, when she first saw the place, going some days in advance of her father and mother, as was her wont, in order to make things ready and comfortable for them, thought how happy she could be if only such a house and garden were hers to enjoy, independently of others. For a week before her respected and respectable parents came, in the intervals of unpacking, and arranging matters so that the domestic “staff” could assume their ordinary duties with smoothness and regularity, she wandered about alone, exploring the beauties of her surroundings, her thin, flat figure striking a curious note of sadness and solitude, as she sometimes stood in the garden among a wealth of flowers, looking out to the tender dove-grey line of the horizon across the sea. The servants peeping at her from kitchen and pantry windows, made their own comments.

“Poor dear!” said the cook, thoughtfully—“she do wear thin!”

“Ah, it’s a sad look-out for ’er!” sighed the upper housemaid, who was engaged to a pork-butcher with an alarmingly red face, whom one would have thought any self-respecting young woman would have died rather than wedded. “To be all alone in the world like that, unpertected, as she will be when her pa and ma have gone!”

“Well, they won’t go in a hurry!” put in the butler, who was an observing man—“Leastways, Mr. May won’t; he’ll ’old on to life like a cat to a mouse—he will! He’s that hearty!—why, he thinks he’s about thirty instead of sixty. The missis, now,—if she goes on eating as she do,—she’ll drop off sudden like a burstin’ bean,—but he!—Ah! I shouldn’t wonder if he outlasted us all!”

“Lor, Mr. Jonson!” exclaimed the upper housemaid—“How you do talk!—and you such a young man too!”

Jonson smiled, inwardly flattered. He was well over forty, but like his master wished to be considered a kind of youth, fit for dancing, tennis and other such gamesome occupations.

“Miss Diana,” he now continued, with a judicial air—“has lost her chances. It’s a pity!—for no one won’t marry her now. There’s too many young gels about,—no man wants the old ’uns. She’ll have to take up a ‘mission’ or something to get noticed at all.”

Here a quiet-looking woman named Grace Laurie interposed. She was the ladies’ maid, and she was held in great respect, for she was engaged to marry (at some uncertain and distant date) an Australian farmer with considerable means.

“Miss Diana is very clever—” she said—“She could do almost anything she cared to. She’s got a great deal more in her than people think. And”—here Grace hesitated—“she’s prettily made, too, though she’s over thin,—when she comes from her bath with all her hair hanging down, she looks sweet!” A gurgle of half hesitating, half incredulous laughter greeted this remark.

“Well, it’s few ladies as looks ‘sweet’ coming from the bath!” declared the butler with emphasis. “I’ve had many a peep at the missis——”

Here the laughter broke out loudly, with little cries of: “Oh! Oh!”—and the kitchen chatter ended.

It had come to the last day of Diana’s free and uncontrolled enjoyment of the charming seaside Eden which her parents had selected as a summer retreat,—and regretfully realising this, she strolled lingeringly about the garden, inhaling the sweet odours of roses and mignonette with the salty breath of the sea. The next morning Mr. and Mrs. Polydore May would arrive in time for luncheon, and once more the old domestic jog-trot would commence,—the same routine as that which prevailed at Richmond, with no other change save such as was conveyed in the differing scene and surroundings. Breakfast punctually at nine,—luncheon at one,—tea at four-thirty,—dinner at a quarter to eight. Dinner at a quarter to eight was one of Diana’s bugbears—why not have it at eight o’clock, she thought? The “quarter to” was an irritating juggling with time for which there was no necessity. But she had protested in vain; dinner at quarter to eight was one of her mother’s many domestic “fads.” Between the several meals enumerated there would be nothing doing,—nothing, that is to say, of any consequence or use to anybody. Diana knew the whole weary, stupid round,—Mr. May would pass the morning reading the papers either in the garden or on the sandy shore,—Mrs. May would give a few muddled and contradictory orders to the servants, who never obeyed them literally, but only as far as they could be conveniently carried out, and then would retire to write letters to friends or acquaintances; in the afternoon Mr. May would devote himself to golf, while his wife slept till tea-time,—then she would take a stroll in the garden, and perhaps—only perhaps—talk over a few household affairs with her daughter. Then came the “quarter to eight” dinner with desultory and somewhat wrangling conversation, after which Mrs. May slept again, and Mr. May played billiards, if he could find anyone to play with him,—if not, he practised “tricky” things alone with the cue. Neither of them ever thought that this sort of life was not conducive to cheerfulness so far as their daughter Diana was concerned,—indeed they never considered her at all. When she was young—ah yes, of course!—it was necessary to find such entertainment and society for her as might “show her off,”—but now, when she was no longer marriageable in the conventionally accepted sense of marriage, she was left to bear the brunt of fate as best she might, and learn to be contented with the plain feminine duty of keeping house for her parents. It must be stated that she did this “keeping house” business to perfection,—she controlled expenses without a taint of meanness, managed the servants, and made the whole commonplace affair of ordinary living run smoothly. But whatever she did, she never had a word of praise from either her father or mother,—they took her careful service as their right, and never seemed to realise that most of their comforts and conveniences were the result of her forethought and good sense. Certainly they did not trouble themselves as to whether she was happy or the reverse.

She thought of this,—just a little, but not morosely—on the last evening she was to spend alone at “Rose Lea” as the “ideal” summer residence was called,—probably on account of its facing west, and gathering on its walls and windows all the brilliant flush of the sunset. She was somewhat weary,—she had been occupied for hours in arranging her mother’s bedroom and seeing that all the numerous luxuries needed by that placid mass of superfluous flesh were in their place and order, and now that she had finished everything she had to do, she was glad to have the remainder of her time to herself in the garden, thinking, and—as usual—wondering. Her wonder was just simply this:—How long would she have to go on in the same clockwork mechanism of life as that which now seemed to be her destiny? She had made certain variations in the slow music of her days by study,—yes, that was true!—but then no one made use of her studies,—no one knew the extent of her attainments, and even in her music she had no encouragement,—no one ever asked her to play. All her efforts seemed so much wasted output of energy. She had certain private joys of her own,—a great love of Nature, which like an open door in Heaven allowed her to enter familiarly into some of the marvels and benedictions of creative intelligence; she loved books, and could read them in French and Italian, as well as in her native English; and she had taken to the study of Russian with some success. Greek and Latin she had learned sufficiently well to understand the great authors of the elder world in their own script,—but all these intellectual diversions were organised and followed on her own initiative, and as she sometimes said to herself a trifle bitterly:

“Nobody knows I can do anything but check the tradesmen’s books and order the dinner.”

This was a fact,—nobody knew. Ordinary people considered her unattractive; what they saw was a scraggy woman of medium height with a worn face visibly beginning to wrinkle under a profusion of brown hair,—a woman who “had been” pretty when younger, but who now had a rather restrained and nervous manner, and who was seldom inclined to speak,—yet, who, when spoken to, answered always gently, in a sweet voice with a wonderfully musical accentuation. No one thought for a moment that she might possibly be something of a scholar,—and certainly no one imagined that above all things she was a great student of all matters pertaining to science. Every book she could hear of on scientific subjects, whether treating of wireless telegraphy, light-rays, radium, or other marvellous discoveries of the age, she made it her special business to secure and to study patiently and comprehendingly, the result being that her mind was richly stored with material for thought on far higher planes than the majority of reading folk ever attempt to reach. But she never spoke of the things in which she was so deeply interested, and as she was reserved and almost awkwardly shy in company, the occasional callers on her mother scarcely noticed her, except casually and with a careless civility which meant nothing. She was seen to knit and to do Jacobean tapestry rather well, and people spoke to her of these accomplishments as being what they thought she was most likely to understand,—but they looked askance at her dress, which was always a little tasteless and unbecoming, and opined that “poor dear Mrs. May must be dreadfully disappointed in her daughter!”

It never occurred to these easy-tongued folk that Diana was dreadfully disappointed in herself. This was the trouble of it. She asked the question daily and could find no answer. And yet,—she was useful to her parents surely? Yes,—but in her own heart she knew they would have been just as satisfied with a paid “companion housekeeper.” They did not really “love” her, now that she had turned out such a failure. Alas, poor Diana! Her hunger for “love” was her misfortune; it was the one thing in all the world she craved. It had been this desire of love that had charmed her impulsive soul when in the heyday of her youth and prettiness, she had engaged herself to the man for whom she had waited seven years, only to be heartlessly thrown over at last. She had returned all his letters in exchange for her own at the end of the affair,—all, save two,—and these two she read every night before she said her prayers to keep them well fixed in her memory. One of them contained the following passage:

“How I love you, my own sweet little Diana! You are to me the most adorable girl in the world,—and if ever I do an unkind thing to you or wrong you in any way may God punish me for a treacherous brute! My one desire in life is to make you happy.”

The other letter, written some years later, was rather differently expressed.

“I am quite sure you will understand that time has naturally worked changes, in you as well as in myself, and I am obliged to confess that the feelings I once had for you no longer exist. But you are a sensible woman, and you are old enough now to realise that we are better apart.”

“You are old enough now,” was the phrase that jarred upon Diana’s inward sense, like the ugly sound of a clanking chain in a convict’s cell. “You are old enough now.” Well, it was true!—she was “old enough,”—but she had taken this “oldness” upon her while faithfully waiting for her lover. And he had been the first to punish her for her constancy! It was very strange. Indeed, it was one of those many things that had brought her to her chronic state of wonderment. The great writers,—more notably great poets, themselves the most fickle of men,—eulogised fidelity in love as a heavenly virtue. Why then, when she had practised it, had she been so sorely rewarded? Yet, since the rupture of her engagement, and the long and bitter pain she had endured over this breaking up of all she had held most dear, her many studies and her careful reading had gradually calmed and strengthened her nature, and she was able to admit to herself that there were possibly worse things than the loss of a heartless lover who might have proved a still more heartless husband. She felt no resentment towards him, and his memory now scarcely moved her to a thrill of sorrow or regret. She only asked herself why it had all happened? Of course there was no answer to such a query,—there never is. And she was “old enough”—yes, quite “old enough” to put away all romance and sentimentality. Yet, as she walked slowly in the garden among the roses, and watched the sea sparkling in the warm after-glow of what had been an exceptionally fine sun setting, the old foolish craving stirred in her heart again. The scent of the flowers, the delicate breathings of the summer air, the flash of the sea-gulls’ white wings skimming over the glittering sand pools,—all these expressions of natural beauty saddened while they entranced her soul. She longed to be one with them, sharing their life, and imparting to others something of their joy.

“They never grow old!” she said, half aloud. “Or if they do, it is not perceived. They seem always the same—always beautiful and vital.”

Here she paused. A standard rose tree weighted with splendid blossom showed among its flowers one that had been cramped and spoiled by the over-profusion and close pressure of its companions,—it was decaying amid the eager crowd of bursting buds that looked almost humanly anxious to be relieved of its presence. With soft, deft fingers Diana broke it away from the stem and let it drop to earth.

“That is me!” she said. “And that’s what ought to become of me! Nothing withered or ugly ought to live in such a lovely world. I am a blot on beauty.”

She looked out to sea again. The after-glow had almost faded; only one broad line of dull gold showed the parting trail of the sun.

“No—there’s no hope!” she murmured, with an expressive gesture of her hands. “I must plod on day after day in the same old rut of things, doing my duty, which is perhaps all I ought to ask to do,—trying to make my mother comfortable and to keep my father in decent humour,—and then—then—when they go, I shall be alone in the world. No one will care what becomes of me,—even as it is now no one cares whether I live or die!”

This is the discordant note in many a life’s music,—“no one cares.” When “no one cares” for us, we do not care about ourselves or about anybody else. And in “not caring” we stumble blindly and unconsciously on our only chance of safety and happiness. A heartless truth!—but a truth all the same. For when we have become utterly indifferent to Destiny, Destiny like a spoiled child does all she can to attract our notice, and manifests a sudden interest in us of which we had never dreamed. And the less we care, the more she clings!

CHAPTER II

Diana was “old enough,” as her recalcitrant lover had informed her, to value the blessing of a good night’s rest. She had a clear conscience,—she was, indeed, that rara avis, in these days, a perfectly innocent-minded woman, and she slept as calmly and peacefully as a child. When she woke to the light of a radiant morning, with the sunshine making diamonds of the sea, she felt almost young again as she tripped to and fro, putting the final touches of taste to the pretty drawing-room, and giving to every nook and corner that indefinable air of pleasant occupation which can only be bestowed by the hand of a dainty, beauty-loving woman. At the appointed hour, the automobile was sent to the station to meet Mr. and Mrs. James Polydore May, and punctual to time the worthy couple arrived, both husband and wife slightly out of humour with the heat of the fine summer’s day and the fatigue of the journey from London.

“Well, Diana!” sighed her mother, turning a fat, buff-coloured cheek to be kissed, “is the house really decent and comfortable?”

“It’s lovely!” declared Diana, cheerfully—“I’m sure you’ll be happy here, Mother! The garden is perfectly delightful!”

“Your mother spoke of the house, not the garden,” interposed Mr. May, judicially. “You really must be accurate, Diana! Yes—er—yes!—that will do!”—this, as Diana somewhat shrinkingly embraced him. “Your mother is always suspicious—and rightly so—of damp in rented country houses, but I think we made ourselves certain that there was nothing of that kind before we decided to take it. And no poultry clucking?—no noises of a farmyard close by? No? That’s a comfort! Yes—er—it seems fairly suitable. Is luncheon ready?”

Diana replied that it was, and the family of three were soon seated at table in the dining-room, discussing lobster mayonnaise. As Mrs. May bent her capacious bosom over her plate, her round eyes goggling with sheer greed, and Mr. May ate rapidly as was his wont, casting sharp glances about him to see if he could find fault with anything, Diana’s heart sank more and more. It was just the same sort of luncheon as at home in Richmond, tainted by the same sordid atmosphere of commonplace. Her parents showed no spark of pleasurable animation or interest in the change of scene or the loveliness of the garden and sea as glimpsed through the open French windows,—everything had narrowed into the savoury but compressed limit of lobster mayonnaise.

“Too much mustard in this, as usual,” said Mr. May, scraping his plate noisily.

“Not at all,” retorted his wife, with placid obstinacy. “If there is anything Marsh knows how to make with absolute perfection, it is mayonnaise.”

Marsh was the cook, and the cause of many a matrimonial wrangle.

“Oh, of course, Marsh is faultless!” sneered Mr. May. “This house has been taken solely that Marsh shall have a change of air and extra perquisites!”

Mrs. May’s eyes goggled a little more prominently, and protecting her voluminous bust with a dinner-napkin, she took a fresh supply of mayonnaise. Diana, who was a small eater and who rather grudged the time her parents spent over their meals, took no part in this sort of “sparring,” which always went on between the progenitors of her being. She was thankful when luncheon was over and she could escape to her own room. There she found the maid, Grace Laurie, with some letters which had just arrived.

“These are for you, miss,” said Grace. “I brought them up out of the hall, as I thought you’d like to be quiet for a bit.”

Diana smiled, gratefully.

“Thank you, Grace. Mother is coming upstairs directly to lie down—will you see she has all she wants?”

“Yes, miss.” Then, after a pause, “It’s you that should lie down and get a rest, Miss Diana,—you’ve been doing ever such a lot all these days. You should just take it easy now.”

Diana smiled again. There was something of kindly compassion in the “take it easy” suggestion—but she nodded assentingly and the well-meaning maid left her.

There was a long mirror against the wall, and Diana suddenly saw her own reflection in it. A hot flush of annoyance reddened her face,—what a scarecrow she looked to herself! So angular and bony! Her plain navy linen frock hung as straight as a man’s trousers; no gracious curves of body gave prettiness to its uncompromising folds,—and as for her poor worn countenance, she could have thrown things at it for its doleful pointed chin and sharp nose! She looked steadfastly into her own eyes,—they were curious in colour, and rather pretty with their melting hues of blue and grey,—but, oh!—those crows’-feet at the corners!—oh, the wrinkling of the eyelids!—oh, the tiredness, and dimness and ache!

Turning abruptly away, she glanced at the small time-piece on her dressing-table. It was three o’clock. Then she took off her navy linen gown,—one of the “serviceable,” ugly sort of things her father was never tired of recommending for her wear,—and slipped on a plain little white wrapper which she had made for herself out of a cheap length of nun’s veiling. She loosened her hair and brushed it out,—it fell to her waist in pretty rippling waves, and it was full of golden “glints,” so much so that spiteful persons of her own sex had even said—“at her age it can’t be natural; it must be dyed!” Nevertheless, its curling tendency and its brightness were all its own, but Diana took no heed of its beauty, and she would have been more than incredulous had anyone told her that in this array, or, rather, disarray, she had the appearance of a time-worn picture of some delicate saint in a French mediæval “Book of Hours.” But such was her aspect. And with the worn saint look upon her, she drew a reclining chair to the window and lay down, stretching herself restfully at full length, and gazing out to sea, her unopened letters on her lap. How beautiful was that seemingly infinite line of shining water, melting into shining sky!—how far removed from the little troubles and terrors of the world of mankind!

“I wonder——!” she murmured. The old story again!—she was always wondering! Then, with eyes growing almost youthful in their intense longing for comprehension, she became absorbed in one of those vague reveries, which, like the things of eternity, have no beginning and no end. She “wondered”—yes!—she wondered why, for example, Nature was so grand and reasonable, and Man so mean and petty, when surely he could, if he chose, be master of his own fate,—master of all the miracles of air, fire and water, and supreme sovereign of his own soul! A passage in a book she had lately been reading recurred to her memory.

“If any man once mastered the secret of governing the chemical atoms of which he is composed, he would discover the fruit of the Tree of Life of which, as his Creator said, he would ‘take, eat and live for ever!’”

She sighed,—a sigh of weariness and momentary depression, then began turning over her letters and glancing indifferently at the handwriting on each envelope, till one, addressed in a remarkably clear, bold caligraphy, made her smile in evidently pleasurable anticipation.

“From Sophy Lansing,” she said. “Dear little Sophy! She’s always amusing, with her Suffragette enthusiasms, and her vivacious independent ways! And she’s one of those very few clever women who manage to keep womanly and charming in spite of their cleverness. Oh, what a fat letter!”

She opened it and read the dashing scrawl, still smiling.

“Dearest Di,

“I suppose you are now settling down ‘by the sad sea waves’ with Pa and Ma! Oh, you poor thing! I can see you hard at it like a donkey at a well, trotting ‘in the common round, the daily task’ of keeping Pa as tolerable in temper as such an old curmudgeon can be, and Ma as reposeful under her burden of superfluous flesh as is at all possible. What a life for you, patient Grizel! Why don’t you throw it up? You are really clever, and you could do so much. This is Woman’s Day, and you are a woman of exceptional ability. You know I’ve asked you over and over again to retire from the whole domestic ‘show,’ and leave those most uninteresting and selfish old parents of yours to their own devices, with a paid housekeeper to look after their food, which is all they really care about. Come and live with me in London. We should be quite happy together, for I’m good-natured and sensible, and so are you, and we’re neither of us contending for a man, so we shouldn’t quarrel. And you’d wake up, Diana!—you’d wake to find that there are many more precious things in life than Pa and Ma! I could even find you a few men to entertain you, though most of them become bores after about an hour—especially the ones that think themselves vastly amusing. Like your Pa, you know!—who, when he tells a very ancient ‘good story,’ thinks that God Himself ought to give up everything else to listen to him! No, don’t be shocked! I’m not really irreverent—but you know it’s true. Woe betide the hapless wight, male or female, who dares utter a word while Pa Polydore is on the story trail! How I’ve longed to throw things at him! and have only refrained for your sake! Well! God a’ mercy on us, as Shakespeare’s Ophelia says, and defend us from the anecdotal men!

“You’ll perhaps be interested to hear that a proposal of marriage was made to me last night. The bold adventurer is rather like your Pa,—well ‘on’ in years, rich, with a prosperous ‘tum’—and a general aspect of assertive affluence. I said ‘No,’ of course, and he asked me if I knew what I was doing? Exactly as if he thought I might be drunk, or dreaming! I replied that I was quite aware of myself, of him, and the general locality. ‘And yet you say No?’ he almost whispered, in a kind of stupefied amazement. I repeated ‘No’—and ‘No,’—and clinched the matter by the additional remark that he was the last sort of man I would ever wish to marry. Then he smiled feebly, and said ‘Poor child!—you have been sadly led astray! These new ideas——’ I cut him short by ringing the bell and ordering tea, and fortunately just at the moment in came Jane Prowser—you know her!—the tall, bony woman who goes in for ‘Eugenics,’ and she did the scarecrow business quite effectively. As soon as she began to talk in her high, rasping voice he went! Then I had tea alone with the Prowser—rather a trying meal, as she would, she would describe in detail all the deformities and miseries of a child ‘wot ’adn’t no business to be born,’ as my housemaid once remarked of a certain domestic upset. However, I got rid of her after she had eaten all the cress and tomato sandwiches, and then I started to read a batch of letters from abroad. I’m so thankful for my foreign correspondents!—they write and spell so well, and always have something interesting to say. One of my great friends in Paris, Blanche de Rouailles, sent me a most curious advertisement, which she tells me is appearing in all the French papers—I enclose it for you, as you are so ‘scientific’ and it may interest you. It is rather curiously worded and sounds ‘uncanny!’ But it occupies nearly half a column in all the principal Paris papers and is repeated in five different languages,—French, Italian, Spanish, Russian and English. I suppose it’s a snare or a ‘do’ of some sort. The world is full of scoundrels, even in science! Now remember what I tell you! Come to me at once if Pa and Ma kick over the traces and allow their ingrained selfishness to break out of bounds. There’s plenty of room for you in my cosy little flat and we can have a real good time together. Don’t bother about money,—with your talent and knowledge of languages you can soon earn some, and I’ll put you in the way of it. You really must do something for your own advantage,—surely you don’t mean to waste your whole life in soothing Pa and massaging Ma? It may be dutiful but it must be dull! I don’t think all the massaging in the world will ever reduce Ma to normal proportions, and certainly nothing can ever cure Pa of his detestable humours which are always lurking in ambush below his surface ‘manner,’ ready to jump out like little black devils on the smallest provocation. We can never be really grateful enough, dear Di, for our single blessedness! Imagine what life would have been for us with husbands like Pa! Absolute misery!—for you and I could never have taken refuge in food and fat like Ma! We would have died sooner than concentrate our souls on peas and asparagus!—we would have gone to the stake like martyrs rather than have allowed our bosoms to swell with the interior joys of roast pork and stuffing! Oh yes!—there is much to be thankful for in our spinsterhood,—we can go to our little beds in peace, knowing that no pig-like snoring from the ‘superior’ brute will disturb the holy hours of the night!—and if we are clever enough to make a little money, we can spend it as we like, without being cross-examined as to why it is that the dress we wore four years ago is worn out, and why we must have another! I could run on for pages and pages concerning the blessings and privileges of unmarried women, but I’ll restrain my enthusiasm till we meet. Let that meeting be soon!—and remember that I am always at your service as a true friend and that I’ll do anything in the world to help you out of your domestic harness. For the old people who ‘drive’ you can’t and won’t see what a patient, kind, helpful clever daughter they’ve got, and they don’t deserve to keep you. Let them spend their spare cash on a housekeeper, who is sure to cheat them (and a good job too!) and take your freedom. Get away!—never mind how, or where, or when,—but don’t spend all your life in drudging. You’ve done enough of it—get away! This is the best of good advice from your loving friend,

“Sophy Lansing.”

A slight shadow of meditative gravity clouded Diana’s face as she finished reading this letter. She was troubled by her own thoughts; Sophy’s lively strictures on her parents were undoubtedly correct and deserved,—and yet—“father and mother” were “father and mother” after all! It is curious how these two words still keep their sentimental significance, despite “state” education! “Mother” in the lower classes is often a drab, and in the higher a frivolous wastrel; “father” in the slums may beat his children black and blue, and in Mayfair neglect them to the point of utmost indifference,—but “mother and father,” totally undeserving as they often are, still come in for a share of their offspring’s vague consideration and lingering respect. “Education” of the wrong sort, however, is doing its best to deprive them of this regard, and it appears likely that the younger generation will soon be so highly instructed as to be able to ignore “mother and father” as easily as full-fledged cygnets ignore the parent birds who drive them away from their nesting haunts. But Diana was “old-fashioned”; she had an affectionate nature, and she took pathetic pains to persuade herself that “Pa” and “Ma” meant to be kind, and must in their hearts love her, their only child. This was pure fallacy, but it was the only little bit of hope and trust left to her in a hard world, and she was loth to let it go. The smallest expression of tenderness from that ruffled old human terrier, her father, would have brought her to his feet, an even more willing slave to his moods than she already was,—a loving embrace from her mother would have moved her almost to tears of joy and gratitude, and would have doubly strengthened her unreasoning and unselfish devotion to the “bogey” of her duty. But she never received any such sign of affection or encouragement from year’s end to year’s end,—and it was like a strange dream to her now to recall that when she had been young, in the time of her “teens,” her father had called her his “beautiful girl,” and her mother had chosen pretty frocks for her “darling child!” Youth and the prospects of marriage had made this difference in the temperature of parental tenderness. Now that she was at that fatal stop-gap called “middle-age” and a hopeless spinster, the pretty frocks and the “beautiful-girl-darling-child” period had vanished with her matrimonial chances. There was no help for it.

At this point in her thoughts she gave a little half-unconscious sigh. Mechanically she folded up Sophy Lansing’s letter, and as she did so, noticed that a slip of printed paper had fallen out of it and lay on the floor. She turned herself on her reclining chair and stooped for it,—then as she picked it up realised that it must be the advertisement in the five different languages which her friend had mentioned. Glancing carelessly over it at first, but afterwards more attentively, her interest was aroused by its unusual wording, and then as she read it over and over again she found in it a singular attraction. It ran as follows:

“To ANY WOMAN who is alone in the world WITHOUT CLAIMS on HER TIME or HER AFFECTIONS.

“A SCIENTIST, engaged in very IMPORTANT and DIFFICULT WORK, requires the ASSISTANCE and CO-OPERATION of a Courageous and Determined Woman of mature years. She must have a fair knowledge of modern science, and must not shrink from dangerous experiments or be afraid to take risks in the pursuit of discoveries which may be beneficial to the human race. Every personal care, consideration and courtesy will be shown towards her, and she will be paid a handsome sum for her services and be provided with full board and lodging in an elegant suite of apartments placed freely at her disposal. She must be prepared to devote herself for one or two years entirely to the study of very intricate problems in chemistry, concerning which she will be expected to maintain the strictest confidence. She must be well educated, especially in languages and literature, and she must have no ties of any kind or business which can interrupt or distract her attention from the serious course of training which it will be necessary for her to pursue. This Advertisement cannot be answered by letter. Each applicant must present herself personally and alone between the hours of 6 a.m. and 8 a.m. on Tuesdays and Fridays only to

“DR. FÉODOR DIMITRIUS,
“Château Fragonard,
“Geneva.”

The more Diana studied this singular announcement, the more remarkable and fascinating did it seem. The very hours named as the only suitable ones for interviewing applicants, between six and eight in the morning, were unusual enough, and the whole wording of the advertisement implied something mysterious and out of the common.

“Though I dare say it is, as Sophy suggests, only a snare of some sort,” she thought. “And yet to me it sounds genuine. But I don’t think this Dr. Féodor Dimitrius will get the kind of woman he wants easily. A handsome salary with board and lodging are tempting enough, but few women would be inclined to ‘take risks’ in the inventions and discoveries of modern science. Some of them are altogether too terrible!”

She read the advertisement carefully through again, then rose and locked it away in her desk with Sophy Lansing’s letter. She glanced through the rest of her correspondence, which was not exciting,—one note asking for the character of a servant, another for the pattern of a blouse, and a third enclosing a recipe for a special sort of jam, “with love to your sweet kind mother!”

She put them all by, and stretching her arms languidly above her head, caught another glimpse of herself in the mirror. This time it was more satisfactory. Her hair, hanging down to her waist, was full of a brightness, made brighter just now by the sunlight streaming through the window, and her nun’s veiling “rest gown” had a picturesque grace in its white fall and flow which softened the tired look of her face and eyes into something like actual prettiness. The fair ghost of her lost youth peeped at her for a moment, awakening a smarting sense of regretful tears. A light tap at the door fortunately turned the current of her thoughts, and the maid Grace Laurie entered, bearing a dainty little tray with a cup of tea invitingly set upon it.

“I’ve just taken some tea to Mrs. May in her bedroom,” she said. “And I thought you’d perhaps like a cup.”

“You’re a treasure, Grace!”—and Diana sat down to the proffered refreshment. “What shall we all do when you go away to be married?”

Grace laughed and tossed her head.

“Well, there’s time enough for that, miss!” she replied. “He ain’t in no hurry, nor am I! You see when you’re married you’re just done for,—there’s no more fun. It’s drudge, wash, cook and sew for the rest of your days, and no way of getting out of it.”

Diana, sipping her tea, looked at her, smiling.

“If that’s the way you think, you shouldn’t marry,” she said.

“Oh yes, I should!” and Grace laughed again. “A woman like me wants a home and a man to work for her. I don’t care to be in service all my days,—I may as well wash and sew for a man of my own as for anybody else.”

“But you love him, don’t you?” asked Diana.

“Well, he isn’t much to love!” declared Grace, with twinkling eyes. “His looks wouldn’t upset anyone’s peace! I’ve never thought of love at all—all I want is to be warm and comfortable in a decent house with plenty to eat,—and a good husband is a man who can do that, and keep it going. As for loving, that’s all stuff and nonsense!—as I always say you should never care more for a man with your ’ed than you can kick off with your ’eels.”

This profound utterance had the effect of moving Diana to the most delightful mirth. She laughed and laughed again,—and her laughter was so sweet and fresh that it was like a little chime of bells. Her voice, as already hinted, was her great charm, and whether she laughed or spoke her accents broke the air into little bars of music.

“Oh, Grace, Grace!” she said, at last. “You are too funny for words! I must learn that wise saying of yours by heart! What is it? ‘Never care more for a man with your ’ed than you can kick off with your ’eels’?—Splendid! And you mean it?”

Grace nodded emphatically.

“Of course I mean it! It don’t do to care too much for a man,—he’s always a sort o’ spoilt babe, and what he gets easy he don’t care for, and what he can’t have he’s always crying, crying after. You’ll find that true, Miss Diana!”

The sparkle of laughter quenched itself in Diana’s eyes and left her looking weary.

“Yes—I daresay you are right,” she said—“quite right, Grace!” And looking up, she spoke slowly and rather sadly. “Perhaps it’s true—some people say it is—that men like bad women better than good,—and that if a woman is thoroughly selfish, vain and reckless, treating men with complete indifference and contempt, they admire her much more than if she were loving and faithful.”

“Of course!” assented Grace, positively. “Look at Mrs. Potter-Barney!—the one the halfpenny newspapers call the ‘beautiful Mrs. Barney’! I know a maid who was told by another maid that she got five hundred guineas for a kiss!—and Lady Wasterwick has had thousands of pounds for——”

Diana held up a hand,—she smiled still, but a trifle austerely.

“That will do, Grace!”

Grace coughed discreetly and subsided.

“Is mother still lying down?” then asked Diana.

“Yes, miss. She’ll be on her bed till the dinner dressing bell rings. And Mr. May’s asleep over his newspaper in the garden.”

Again Diana laughed her clear, pretty laugh. The somnolent habits of her parents were so enlivening, and made home-life so cheerful!

“Well, all right, Grace,” she said. “If there’s nothing for me to do I shall go for a walk presently. So you’ll know what to say if I’m asked for.”

Grace assented, and then departed. Diana finished her cup of tea in meditative mood,—then, resolving to throw her retrospective thoughts to the winds, prepared to go out. It was an exceptionally fine afternoon, warm and brilliant, and instead of her navy linen gown which had seen considerable wear and tear, she put on a plain white one which became her much better than the indigo blue, and, completing her costume with a very simple straw hat and white parasol, she went downstairs and out of the house into the garden. She had meant to avoid her father, whom she saw on the lawn, under the spreading boughs of a cedar tree, seated in one rustic arm-chair, with his short legs comfortably disposed on another, and the day’s newspaper modestly spread as a coverlet over his unbuttoned waistcoat,—but an inquisitive wasp happening to buzz too near his nose he made a dart at it with one hand, and opening his eyes, perceived her white figure moving across the grass.

“Who’s that? What’s that?” he called out, sharply. “Don’t glide about like a ghost! Is it you, Diana?”

“Yes,—it’s me,” she replied, and came up beside him.

He gave her a casual look,—then sniffed and smiled sardonically.

“Dear me! How fine we are! I thought it was some young girl of the neighbourhood leaving cards on your mother! Why are you wearing white? Going to a wedding?”

Diana coloured to the roots of her pretty hair.

“It’s one of my washing frocks,” she submitted.

“Oh, is it? Well, I like to see you in dark colours—they are more suited to—to your age. Only very young people should wear white.”

He yawned capaciously. “Only very young people,” he repeated, closing his eyes. “Try and remember that.”

“Mrs. Ross-Percival wears white,” said Diana, quietly. “You are always holding her up to admiration. And she’s sixty, if she’s a day.”

Mr. Polydore May opened his eyes and bounced up in his chair.

“Mrs. Ross-Percival is a very beautiful woman!” he snapped out. “One of the beautiful women of society. And she’s married.”

“Oh, yes, she’s a grandmother,” murmured Diana, smiling. “But you don’t tell her not to wear white.”

“Good God, of course not! It’s no business of mine! What are you talking about? She’s not my daughter!”

Diana laughed her pretty soft laugh.

“No, indeed! Poor Pa! That would be terrible!—she’d make you seem so old if she were! But perhaps you wouldn’t mind as she’s so beautiful!”

Mr. May stared at her wrathfully with the feeling that he was being made fun of.

“She is beautiful!” he said, firmly. “Only a jealous woman would dare to question it!”

Diana laughed again.

“Very well, she is beautiful! Wig and all!” she said, and moved away, opening her parasol as she passed from the shadow of the cedar boughs into the full sun.

“She’s getting beyond herself!” thought her father, watching her as she went, and noting what he was pleased to consider “affectation” in her naturally graceful way of walking. “And if she once begins that sort of game, she’ll be unbearable! Nothing can be worse than an old maid who gets beyond herself or above herself! She’ll be fancying some man is in love with her next!”

He gave a snort of scorn and composed himself to sleep again; meanwhile Diana had left the garden and was walking at an easy pace, which was swift without seeming hurried, down to the sea shore. It was very lovely there at this particular afternoon hour,—the tide was coming in, and the long shining waves rolled up one after the other in smooth lines of silver on sand that shone in wet patches like purest gold. The air was soft and warm but not oppressive, and as the solitary woman lifted her eyes to the peaceful blue sky arched like a sheltering dome above the peaceful blue sea, her solitude was for the moment more intensified. More keenly than ever she felt that there was no one to whom she could look for so much as a loving word,—not in her own home, at any rate. Her friends were few; Sophy Lansing was one of the most intimate,—but Sophy lived such a life of activity, throwing her energies into so many channels, that it was not possible to get into very close or constant companionship with her.

“While I live,” she said to herself, deliberately, “I shall have no one to care for me—I must make up my mind to that. And when I die,—if I go to heaven there will be no one there who cares for me,—and, if I go to hell, no one there either!” She laughed at this idea, but there were tears in her eyes. “It’s curious not to have anyone on earth or in heaven or hell who wants you! I wonder if there are many like that! And yet—I’ve never done anything wicked or spiteful to deserve being left so unloved.”

She had come to a small, deep cove, picturesquely walled in by high masses of rock whose summits were gay with creeping plants, grass and flowers, and though the sea was calm, the pressure of the incoming tide through the narrow inlet made waves that were almost boisterous, as they rushed in and out with a musical splash and roar. It was hardly safe or prudent to walk further on. “Any of those waves could carry one off one’s feet in a minute,” she thought, and went upwards from the beach beyond the highest mark left by the fringes of the sea, where the fragments of an old broken boat made a very good seat. Here she rested awhile, allowing vague ideas of a possible future to drift through her brain. The prospect of a visit to Sophy Lansing seemed agreeable enough,—but she very well knew that it would be opposed by her parents,—that her mother would say she could not spare her,—and that her father would demand angrily:

“What have I taken this seaside house for? Out of pure good-nature and unselfishness, just to give you and your mother a summer holiday, and now you want to go away! That’s the way I’m rewarded for my kindness!”

If anyone had pointed out that he had only thought of himself and his own convenience in taking the “seaside house,” and that he had chosen it chiefly because it was close to the golf links and also to the Club, where there was a billiard-room, and that his “women folk” were scarcely considered in the matter at all, he would have been extremely indignant. He never saw himself in any other light but that of justice, generosity and nobility of disposition. Diana knew his “little ways,” and laughed at them though she regretted them.

“Poor Pa!” she would sigh. “He would be so much more lovable if he were not quite so selfish. But I suppose he can’t help it.”

And, on turning all the pros and cons over in her mind, she came to the conclusion that it would not be fair to leave her mother alone to arrange all the details of daily life in a strange house and strange neighbourhood where the tradespeople were not accustomed to the worthy lady’s rather vague ideas of domestic management, such as the ordering of the dinner two hours before it ought to be cooked, and other similar trifles, resulting in kitchen chaos.

“After all, I ought to be very contented!” and lifting her head, she smiled resignedly at the placid sea. “It’s lovely down here,—and I can always read a good deal,—and sew,—I can finish my bit of tapestry,—and I can master that wonderful new treatise on Etheric Vibration——”

Here something seemed to catch her breath,—she felt a curious quickening thrill as though an “etheric vibration” had touched her own nerves and set them quivering. Some words of the advertisement she had lately read sounded on her ears as though spoken by a voice close beside her:

“She must have a fair knowledge of modern science and must not shrink from dangerous experiments, or be afraid to take risks in the pursuit of discoveries which may be beneficial to the human race.”

She rose from her seat a little startled, her cheeks flushing with the stir of some inexplicable excitement in her blood.

“How strange that I should think of that just now!” she said. “I wonder”—and she laughed—“I wonder whether I should suit Dr. Féodor Dimitrius!”

The idea amused her,—it was so new,—so impracticable and absurd! Yet it remained in her mind, giving sparkle to her eyes and colour and animation to her face as she walked slowly home in a sort of visionary reverie.

CHAPTER III

Within a very few days of their “settling down” at Rose Lea, everybody in the neighbourhood,—that is to say, everybody of “county” standing—that height of social magnificence—had left their cards on Mr. and Mrs. Polydore May. They had, of course, previously made the usual private “kind inquiries,”—first as to the newcomers’ financial position, and next as to their respectability, and both were found to be unimpeachable. One of the most curious circumstances in this curious world is the strictness with which certain little bipeds inquire into the reported life and conduct of other little bipeds, the inquisitors themselves being generally the most doubtful characters.

“Funny little man, that Mr. May!” said the woman leader of the “hunting set,” who played bridge all day and as far into the night as she could. “Like a retired tradesman! Must have sold cheese and butter at some time of his life!”

“Oh, no!” explained a male intimate, whose physiognomy strangely resembled that of the fox he chased all the winter. “He made his pile in copper.”

“Oh, did he? Then he’s quite decent?”

“Quite!”

“That daughter of his——”

Here a snigger went round the “county” company. They were discussing the new arrivals at their afternoon tea.

“Poor old thing!”

“Must be forty if she’s a day!”

“Oh, give the dear ‘girl’ forty-five at least!” said a Chivalrous Youth, declining tea, and helping himself to a whisky-soda at the side-board.

“They say she was jilted.”

“No wonder!” And a bleating laugh followed this suggestion.

“I suppose,” remarked one man of gloomy countenance and dyspeptic eye, “I suppose it’s really unpardonable for a woman to get out of her twenties and remain unmarried, but if it happens so I don’t see what’s to be done with her.”

“Smother her!” said the Chivalrous Youth, drinking his whisky.

Everybody laughed. What a witty boy he was!—no wonder his mother was proud of him!

“We shall have to ask her to one or two tennis parties,” said the woman who had first spoken. “We can’t leave her out altogether.”

“She doesn’t play,” said the gloomy man. “She told me so. She reads Greek.”

A shrill chorus of giggles in falsetto greeted this announcement.

“Reads Greek! How perfectly dreadful! A blue-stocking!”

“No! Really! It’s too weird!” exclaimed the bridge-and-hunting lady. “I hope she’s not an ‘art’ person?”

“No.” And the gloomy man began to be cheerful, seeing that his talk had awakened a little interest. “No, not at all. She told me she liked pictures, but hated artists. I said she couldn’t have pictures without artists, and she agreed, but observed that fortunately all the finest pictures of the world were painted by artists who were dead. Curious way of putting it!”

“Going off it?” queried the Chivalrous Youth, having now drained his tumbler of drink.

“No, I don’t think so. The fact is—er—she—well, she appeared to me to be rather—er—clever!”

Clever? Oh, surely not! The “county” dames almost shuddered. Clever? She couldn’t be, you know!—not with that spoilt old-young sort of face! And her hair! All dyed, of course! And her voice was very affected, wasn’t it? Yes!—almost as if she were trying to imitate Sarah Bernhardt! So stupid in a woman of her age! She ought to know better!

So the little vicious, poisonous, gossiping mouths jabbered and hissed about the woman who was “left” like a forgotten apple on a bough to wither and drop unregarded to the ground. No one had anything kind to say of her. It mattered not at all that they were not really acquainted with her personally or sufficiently to be able to form an opinion,—the point with these precious sort of persons was, and always is, that an unwanted feminine nonentity had arrived in the neighbourhood who was superfluous, and therefore likely to be tiresome.

“One can always leave her out of a dinner invitation,” said one woman, thoughtfully. “It will be quite enough to ask Mr. and Mrs.”

“Oh, quite!”

Thus it was settled; meanwhile Diana, happily unconscious of any discussion concerning her, went on the even tenor of her way, keeping house for her parents, reading her favourite authors, studying her “scientific” subjects, and working at her tapestry without any real companionship save that of books and her own thoughts, and the constant delight she had in the profusion of flowers with which the gardens of Rose Lea abounded. These she arranged with exquisite taste and effect in the various rooms, so artistically that on one occasion the vicar of the parish, quite a dull, unimaginative man, was moved, during an afternoon call, to compliment Mrs. Polydore May on the remarkable grace with which some branches of roses were grouped in a vase on the table. Mrs. May looked at them sleepily and smiled.

“Very pretty, yes!” she murmured. “I used to arrange every flower myself, but now my daughter Diana does it for me. You see she can give her time to it,—she has nothing else to do.”

The vicar smiled the usual smile of polite agreement to everything which always gives a touch of sickliness to the most open countenance, and said no more. Diana was not present, so she did not hear that her mother considered she “had nothing else to do” but arrange flowers. Even if she had heard it, she would hardly have contradicted it; it was one of those things which she would not have thought worth while arguing about. The fact that she governed all the domestic working of the house so that it ran like a perfectly-going machine on silent and well-oiled wheels, required no emphasis,—at least, not in her opinion,—and though she knew that not one of the servants would have stayed in Mrs. May’s service or put up with her vague, fussy, and often sulky disposition, unless she, Diana, had “managed” them, she took no credit to herself for the comfortable and well-ordered condition of things under which her selfish old parents enjoyed their existence. That she “had nothing else to do but arrange flowers” was a sort of house tradition with “Pa” and “Ma” through which they found all manner of excuse for saddling her with as much work as they could possibly give her in the way of constant attendance on themselves. But she did not mind. She was obsessed by the “Duty” fetish, which too often makes prisoners and slaves of those who should be free. Like all virtues, devotion to duty can become a vice if carried to excess, and it is unquestionably a vice when it binds unselfish souls to unworthy and tyrannical taskmasters.

The summer moved on in shining weeks of sunlight and still air, and Rose Lea lost nothing of its charm for Diana, despite the taint of the commonplace with which the eating and sleeping silkworm-lives of her parents invested it. Now and then a few visitors came from London,—men and women of the usual dull type, bringing no entertainment in themselves, and whose stay only meant a little more expenditure and a more lavish display of food. One or two portly club friends of James Polydore came to play golf and drink whisky with him, and they condescended to converse with Diana at meals, because, perforce, they thought they must,—but meals being over, they gave her no further consideration, except to remark casually one to another: “Pity old Polydore couldn’t have got that daughter off his hands!” And the long, lovely month of August was nearly at its end when an incident happened which, like the small displacement of earth that loosens an avalanche, swept away all the old order of things, giving place to a new heaven and a new earth so far as Diana was concerned.

It had been an exceedingly warm day, and nightfall was more than usually welcome after the wide glare of the long, sunlit hours. Dinner was over, and Mr. and Mrs. Polydore May, fed to repletion and stimulated by two or three glasses of excellent champagne, were resting in a dolce-far-niente condition, each cushioned within a deep and luxurious arm-chair placed on either side of the open French windows of the drawing-room. The lawn in front of them was bathed in a lovely light reflected from the after-glow of the vanished sun and a pale glimmer from the risen half-moon, which hung in soft brilliance over the eastern half of the quiet sea. Diana had left her parents to their after-dinner somnolence, and was walking alone in the garden, up and down a grass path between two rose hedges. She was within call should she be wanted by either “Pa” or “Ma,” but they were not aware of her close proximity. Mr. May was smoking an exceptionally choice cigar,—he was in one of his “juvenile” moods, and for once was not inclined to take his usual “cat-nap” or waking doze. He had been to a tennis party that afternoon and had worn, with a “young man’s fancy” a young man’s flannels, happily unconscious of the weird appearance he presented in that unsuitable attire,—and, encouraged by the laughter and applause of the more youthful players, who looked upon him as the “comic man” of the piece, he had acquitted himself tolerably well. So that for the moment he had cast off the dignity and weight of years, and the very air with which he smoked his cigar, flicking off the burnt ash now and again in the affected style of a “young blood about town,” expressed the fact that he considered himself more than a merely “well-preserved” man, and that if justice were done him he would be admitted to be “a violet in the youth of primy nature.”

His better-half was not in quite such pleasant humour; she was self-complacent enough, but the heat of the day had caused her to feel stouter and more unwieldy than usual, and inclined to wish:

“Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt,

Thaw and dissolve itself into a dew!”

When her husband lit his cigar, she had closed her eyes, thinking: “Now there will be a little peace!” knowing that a good cigar to an irritable man is like the bottle to a screaming baby. But Mr. May was disposed to talk, just as he was disposed to admire the contour of his little finger whenever he drew his cigar from his mouth or put it back again.

“There were some smart girls playing tennis to-day,” he presently remarked. “One of them I thought very pretty. She was about seventeen.”

His wife yawned expansively. She made no comment.

“She was my partner,” went on Mr. May. “As skittish as you please!”

Mrs. May cuddled herself together among her cushions. The slightest glimmer of a smile lifted the corners of her pursy mouth towards her parsimonious nose. Her husband essayed once more the fascinating “flick” of burnt ash from his cigar.

“They’d have been as dull as a sermon at tea-time if it hadn’t been for me,” he resumed. “You see, I kept the ball rolling.”

“Naturally!—it’s tennis,” murmured his wife, drowsily.

“Don’t be a fool, Margaret! I mean I keep people amused.”

“I’m sure you do!” his “Margaret” agreed, as she smothered another yawn. “You’re the most amusing man I know!”

“Glad you admit it!” he said, captiously. “Not being amusing yourself, you ought to thank God you’ve got an amusing husband!”

This time Mrs. May emitted a bleating giggle.

“I do!”

“Now if it were not for Diana——”

His wife opened her eyes.

“What about Diana?”

“Well—Diana—put it how you like, but she’s Diana. She’ll never be anything else! Our daughter, oh, yes!—I know all that!—hang sentiment! Everybody calls her an old maid—and she’s in the way.”

A light-footed figure pacing up and down the grass walk, unseen between the two rose hedges close by, came to a sudden pause—listening.

“She’s in the way,” repeated Mr. May, with somewhat louder emphasis. “Unmarried women of a certain age always are, you know. You can’t class them with young people, and they don’t like being parcelled off with old folks. They’re out of it altogether unless they’ve got something to do which takes them away from their homes and saves them from becoming a social nuisance. They’re superfluous. ‘How is your daughter?’ the women here ask me, with a kind of pitying smile, as though she had the plague, or was recovering from small-pox. To be a spinster over thirty seems to them a kind of illness.”

“Well, it’s an illness that cannot be cured with Diana now!” sighed Mrs. May. “Quite hopeless!”

“Quite.” And her husband gave his chronic snort of ill-tempered defiance. “It’s a most unfortunate thing—especially for me. You see, when I go about with a daughter like Diana, it makes me seem so old!”

“And me!” she interposed. “You talk only of yourself,—don’t forget me!”

Mr. May laughed—a short, sardonic laugh.

“You! My dear Margaret, I don’t wish to be unkind, but really you needn’t worry yourself on that score! Surely you don’t suppose you’ll ever look young again? Think of your size, Margaret!—think of your size!”

Somewhat roused from her customary inertia by this remark, Mrs. May pulled herself up in her chair with an assumption of dignity.

“You are very coarse, James,” she said—“very coarse indeed! I consider that I look as young as you do any day,—I ought to, for you are fully eight years my senior—I daresay more, for I doubt if you gave your true age when I married you. You want to play the young man, and you only make yourself ridiculous,—I have no wish to play the young woman, but certainly Diana, with her poor, thin face—getting so many wrinkles, too!—does make me seem older than I am. She has aged terribly the last three or four years.”

“She’ll never see forty again,” said Mr. May, tersely.

Mrs. May rolled up her eyes in pained protest.

“Why say it?” she expostulated. “You only give yourself and me away! We are her parents!”

“I don’t say it in public,” he replied. “Catch me! But it’s true. Let me see!—why, Diana was born in——”

His wife gave an angry gesture.

“Never mind when she was born!” she said, with a tremble as of tears in her voice. “You needn’t recall it! Our only child!—and she has spoilt her life and mine too!”

A faint whimper escaped her, and she put a filmy handkerchief to her eyes.

Mr. May took no notice. For women’s tears he had a sovereign contempt.

“The fact is,” he said, judicially, “we ought to have trained her to do something useful. Nursing, or doctoring, or dressmaking, or type-writing. She would have had her business to attend to, which would have kept her away from Us,—and I—we—could have gone about free as air. We need never have mentioned that we had a daughter.”

Mrs. May looked scrutinizingly at her lace handkerchief. She remembered it had cost a couple of guineas, and now there was a hole in it. She must tell Diana to mend it. With this thought uppermost in her always chaotic mind, she said between two long-drawn sighs:

“After all, James, poor Diana does her best. She is very useful in the house.”

“Stuff and nonsense! She does nothing at all! She spoils the servants, if that is what you mean,—allows them to have their own way a great deal too much, in my opinion! It amuses her to play at housekeeping.”

“She doesn’t play at it,” remonstrated Mrs. May, weakly endeavouring to espouse the cause of justice. “She is very earnest and painstaking about it, and does it very well. She keeps down expenses, and saves me a great deal of worry.”

“Hm-m-m!” growled her husband. “It would do you good to be worried a bit! Take down your weight! Of course, what can’t be cured must be endured, but I’ve spoken the brutal truth,—Diana, at her age, and with her looks, and all her chances of marriage gone, is in the way. For instance, suppose I go to a new neighbour’s house, and I’m asked ‘Have you any family?’—I reply: ‘Yes, one daughter.’ Then some fool of a woman says: ‘Oh, do bring your girl with you next time!’ Well, she’s not a ‘girl.’ I don’t wish to say she’s not, but if I do take her with me ‘next time,’ everybody is surprised. You see, when they look at me, they expect my daughter to be quite a young person.”

Mrs. May sank gradually back in her chair, as though she were slowly pushed by an invisible finger.

“Do they?” The query was almost inaudible.

“Of course they do! And upon my soul, it’s rather trying to a man! You ought to sympathise, but you don’t!”

“Well, I really can’t see what’s to be done!” she murmured, closing her eyes in sheer weariness. “Diana cannot help getting older, poor thing!—and she’s our child——”

“Don’t I know she’s our child?” he snapped out. “What do you keep on telling me that for?”

“Why, I mean that you can’t turn her out of the house, or say you don’t want her, or anything of that sort. But I’m sure”—here, the round, pale eyes opened appealingly over the buff-coloured cheeks—“I’m sure, James, that if you don’t wish to take her out with you she’d never dream of expecting you to do so. She’s very unselfish,—besides, she’s so happy with her books.”

“Books—books!—hang books!” he exclaimed, irascibly. “There’s another drawback! If there’s one thing people object to more than another, it’s a bookish spinster! Any assumption of knowledge in a woman is quite enough to keep her out of society!”

His wife yawned.

“I dare say!” she admitted. “But I can’t help it.”

“You want to go to sleep,—that’s what you want!” said Mr. May, contemptuously. “Well, sleep!—I’m going over to the Club.”

She murmured an inward “Thank God!” and settled down in her chair to her deferred and much desired doze. Mr. May threw on his cap,—one of a jaunty shape, which he fondly imagined gave him the look of a dashing sportsman of some thirty summers—and stepped out on to the now fully moonlit lawn, crossing it at as “swinging” a pace as his little legs would allow him, and making for the high road just outside the garden gates.

Not till he had disappeared did the figure which had stayed statuesquely still between the two rose hedges show any sign of movement. Then it stirred, its dark grey draperies swaying like mist in a light wind. The bright moonlight fell on its uplifted face,—Diana’s face, pale always, but paler than ever in that ghostly radiance from the skies. She had heard all,—and there was a curious sense of tightening pain in her throat and round her heart, as if an overflow of tears or laughter struggled against repression. She had stood in such a motionless attitude of strained attention that her limbs felt cramped and stiff, so that when she began to walk it was almost with difficulty. She turned her back to the house and went towards the sea, noiselessly opening the little white gate that led to the shore. She was soon on the smooth soft sand where the little wet pools glittered like silver in the moon, and, going to the edge of the sea, she stood awhile, watching wave after wave glide up in small, fine lines and break at her feet in a delicate fringe of snowy foam. She was not conscious of any particularly keen grief or hurt feeling at the verdict of her general tiresomeness which her parents had passed upon her,—her thoughts were not in any way troubled; she only felt that the last thing she had clung to as giving value to life,—her affection and duty towards the old people,—was counted as valueless,—she was merely “in the way.” Watching the waves, she smiled,—a pitiful little smile.

“Poor old dears!” she said, tenderly,—and again: “Poor old dears!”

Then there arose within her another impulse,—a suggestion almost wildly beautiful,—the idea of freedom! No one wanted her,—not even her father or her mother. Then was she not at liberty? Could she not go where she liked? Surely! Just as a light globe of thistledown is blown by the wind to fall where it will, so she could drift with the movement of casual things anywhere,—so long as she troubled nobody by her existence.

“The world is wide!” she said, half-aloud, stretching her arms with an unconscious gesture of appeal towards the sea. “I have stayed too long in one small corner of it!”

The little waves plashed one upon the other with a musical whisper as though they agreed with her thought,—and yet—yet there was something appalling in the utter loneliness of her heart. No one loved her,—no one wanted her! She was “in the way.” Smarting tears filled her eyes,—but they angered her by their confession of weakness, and she dashed them away with a quick, defiant hand. She began to consider her position coldly and critically. Her thoughts soon ranged themselves in order like obedient soldiers at drill under their commanding officer,—each in its place and ready for action. It was useless to expect help or sympathy from anyone,—she would not get it. She must stand alone. It is perhaps a little hard and difficult to stand alone when one is a woman; it used to be considered cruel and pitiful, but in these days it has become such a matter of course that no one thinks about it or cares. The nature and temperament of woman as God made her, have not altered; with all her “advancement,” she is just as amative, as credulous, as tender, as maternal as ever she was, longing for man’s love as her “right,” which it is, and becoming hardened and embittered when this right is withheld from her,—but the rush of the time is too swift and precipitous for any display of masculine chivalry on her behalf; she has elected to be considered co-equal with man, and she is now, after a considerable tussle, to be given her “chance.” What she will make of the long-deferred privilege remains a matter of conjecture.

Slowly, and with a vague reluctance, Diana turned away from the moonlit sea; the murmur of the little waves followed her, like suggestive whispers. A curious change had taken place in her mentality during the last few minutes. She, who was accustomed to think only of others, now thought closely and consistently of herself. She moved quietly towards the house, gliding like a grey ghost across the lawn which showed almost white in the spreading radiance of the moon,—the drawing-room windows were still open, and Mrs. May was still comfortably ensconced in her arm-chair, sleeping soundly and snoring hideously. Her daughter came up and stood beside her, quite unobserved. Nothing could have been more unlovely than the aspect she presented, sunk among the cushions, a mere adipose heap, with her fat cheeks, small nose and open mouth protruding above the folds of a grey woollen shawl which was her favourite evening wear, her resemblance to a pig being more striking than pleasing. But Diana’s watching face expressed nothing but the gentlest solicitude.

“Poor mother!” she sighed to herself. “She’s tired! And—and of course, it’s natural she should be disappointed in me. I’ve not been a success! Poor dear mother! God bless her!”

She went out of the room noiselessly, and made her way upstairs. She met Grace Laurie.

“I’m going to bed, Grace,” she said. “I’ve got a tiresome headache, and shall be better lying down. If mother wants to know where I am, will you tell her?”

“Yes, miss. Can I do anything for you?” Grace asked, for, as she often said afterwards, she “thought Miss Diana looked a bit feverish.”

“No, thanks very much!” Diana answered in her sweet-voiced, pleasant manner. “Bed is the best place for me. Good-night!”

“Good-night, miss.” And Diana entering her own room, locked the door. She was eager to be alone. Her window was open, and she went to that and looked out. All was silent and calm; the night was beautiful. The sea spread itself out in gently heaving stretches of mingled light and shade, and above it bent a sky in which the moon’s increasing splendour swamped the sparkling of the stars. The air was very still,—not a leaf on any small branch of tree or plant stirred. The scent of roses and sweet-briar and honeysuckle floated upwards like incense from the flower altars of the earth.

“I am free!” murmured Diana to the hushed night. “Free!”

And then, turning, she saw herself in the mirror, as she had already seen herself that day,—only with a greater sense of shock. The evening gown she wore, chosen to please her father’s taste, of dull, dowdy-grey chiffon, intensified her worn and “ageing” look; the colour of her hair was deadened by contrast with it, and in very truth she had at that moment a sad and deplorably jaded aspect.

“Free!” she repeated, in self-scorn. “And what is the use of freedom to me at my age!—and with my face and figure!”

She shrank from her own pitiful “double” in the glass,—it seemed asking her why she was ever born! Then, she put away all doleful thoughts that might weaken her or shake her already formed resolution:—“Nothing venture, nothing have!” she said. And, shutting her window, she drew the blinds and curtains close, so that no glimpse of light from her room might be seen by her father when he should cross the lawn on his return from the Club. She had plenty to do, and she began to do it. She had a clear plan in view, and as she said to herself, a trifle bitterly, she “was old enough” to carry it out. And when all her preparations were fully made and completed, she went to bed and slept peacefully till the first break of dawn.

CHAPTER IV

When morning came it brought with it intense heat and an almost overpowering glare of sunshine, and Mr. James Polydore May, stimulated by the warm atmosphere, went down to breakfast in a suit of white flannels. Why not? A sportive and youthful spirit had entered into him with his yesterday’s experience of tennis, and his “skittish-as-you-please” partner of seventeen; and, walking with a jaunty step, he felt that there was, and could be, no objection to the wearing of white, as far as he was concerned. But—had he not said on the previous day to his daughter, “Only very young people should wear white?” Ah, yes—his daughter, as a woman, was too old for it! ... but he,—why, if the latest scientific dictum is correct, namely, that a man is only as old as his arteries, then he, James Polydore May, was convinced that arterially speaking, he was a mere boy! True, his figure was a little “gone” from its original slimness,—but plenty of golf and general “bracing-up” would soon put that all right, so that even the “skittish-as-you-please” young thing might not altogether despise his attentions. Whistling gaily the charming tune of “Believe me if all those endearing young charms,” he contemplated the well set out breakfast table with satisfaction. He was first in the field that morning, and his better half had not been at the fried bacon before him, selecting all the best bits as was her usual custom. He sat down to that toothsome dish and helped himself bountifully; then, missing the unobtrusive hand which generally placed his cup of tea beside him, he called to the parlour-maid:

“Where’s Miss Diana? Isn’t she up?”

“Oh, yes, sir. She was up very early—about six, I believe,—and she went down to the cove to bathe, so she told the kitchen-maid.”

“Not back yet?”

“No, sir.”

Mr. May pulled out his watch and glanced at it. It was half-past nine. At that moment his wife entered the room.

“Oh, you’re out of bed at last!” he said. “Well, now you can pour out my tea and mind you don’t fill the cup too full. Diana hasn’t got back from her dip.”

Mrs. May was still rather sleepy, and, as usual, more or less inattentive to her husband’s remarks. She began turning over the letters the post had just brought for her, whereat Mr. May gave a sharp rap on the table with the handle of a fork.

“My tea!” he repeated. “D’ye hear? I want my tea!”

Mrs. May rolled her pale eyes at him protestingly as she lifted the teapot.

“I hear perfectly,” she answered with an assumption of dignity. “And please be civil! You can’t bully me as you bully Diana.”

“I bully Diana! I!” And Mr. May gave a short, scornful laugh. “Come, I like that! Why, the woman doesn’t know what bullying is! She’s had a path of roses all her life—roses, I tell you! Never a care,—never a worry,—no financial difficulties—always enough to eat, and a comfortable home to live in. What more can she want? Bully, indeed! If she had married that confounded officer for whom she wasted the best seven years of her life, then she’d have known something about bullying! Rather! And I daresay it ’ud have done her good. Better than being an old maid, anyhow.”

Mrs. May handed him his tea across the table.

“I wonder where she is?” she questioned, plaintively. “I’ve never known her so late before.”

“Went out at six,” said Mr. May, with his mouth full of bacon. “The kitchen-maid saw her go.”

Mrs. May rang a small hand-bell at her side.

The parlour-maid answered it.

“Hasn’t Miss Diana come in?”

“No, ’m.”

Mrs. May rubbed her small nose perplexedly.

“Who saw her go out?”

“The kitchen-maid, ’m. She was cleaning the doorstep when Miss Diana came out, and said she was going for a sea bath. That was about six o’clock, ’m.”

Again Mrs. May rubbed her nose.

“Send Grace here.”

“Yes, ’m.”

Another minute, and Grace Laurie appeared.

“Grace, did you see Miss Diana go out this morning?”

“No, ’m. Last night I met her on the stairs, and she said she had a headache and was going to bed early. I haven’t seen her since.”

“Good heavens, Margaret, what a fuss you’re making!” here exclaimed Mr. May. “One would think she’d been carried off in an aeroplane! Surely she’s old enough to take care of herself! She’s probably gone for a walk after bathing, and forgotten the time.”

“That’s not like Miss Diana, sir,” ventured Grace, respectfully. “She never forgets anything.”

“Another cup of tea, Margaret, and look sharp!” interposed Mr. May, testily.

Mrs. May sighed, and poured hot water into the tea-pot. Then she addressed Grace in a low tone.

“Ask the kitchen-maid just what Miss Diana said.”

Grace retired, and returned again quickly.

“Miss Diana came down at about six this morning,” she said. “And Jenny, the kitchen-maid, was the only one of us up. She was cleaning the doorstep, and moved her pail for Miss Diana to pass. Miss Diana had on her navy blue serge and black straw sailor hat, and she carried what Jenny thought were her bathing things hanging over her arm. She was very bright and said: ‘Good-morning, Jenny! I’m going for a dip in the sea before the sun gets too hot.’ And so she went.”

“And so she went—Amen!” said Mr. May, biting a hard bit of toast noisily. “And so she’ll come back, and wonder what all the deuced fuss is about. As if a woman of her age couldn’t go for a bath and a walk without being inquired after as if she were a two-year-old! Are you going to have your breakfast, Margaret?—or do you prefer to read your letters first?”

His wife made no reply. She was watching the boiling of an egg in a small, specially constructed vessel for the purpose, which Diana had added to the conveniences of the breakfast table. She was annoyed that Diana herself was not there to attend to it. Diana always knew when the egg was done to a turn. Grace still lingered in the room. Mrs. May, languidly raising her fish-like eyes, saw her.

“You can go, Grace.”

“Yes, ’m. Shall I just run out to the shore and see if Miss Diana is coming?”

“Yes. And tell her to make haste back—I want her to do some shopping in the village for me.”

Grace left the room, closing the door behind her. A clock on the mantelpiece gave several little sharp ting-tings.

“What time is that?” asked Mrs. May.

“Ten o’clock,” replied her husband, unfolding the day’s newspaper and beginning to read.

“Dear me! How very extraordinary of Diana to be out from six in the morning till now!” And with the aid of a spoon she carefully lifted the egg she had been watching as though it were the most precious object in life out of the boiling water, in mournful doubt as to whether, after all, it really was done perfectly. “It’s so unlike her.”

“Well, you may be pretty certain no one has run away with her,” said Mr. May, ironically. “She’s safe enough. The ‘dear child’ has not eloped!”

Mrs. May ignored both his words and his manner. She looked at him meditatively over the lid of the silver teapot and permitted herself to smile,—a small, fat, pursy smile.

“Those white flannels have got rather tight for you, haven’t they?” she suggested.

He flushed indignantly.

“Tight? Certainly not! Do they look tight?”

“Well—just a little!—but of course white always makes one appear stout——”

“Stout! You talk about stoutness? You! Why, I’m a paper-knife compared to you!—a positive paper-knife! I believe you actually grudge my wearing white flannels!”

His wife laughed.

“Indeed, no!” she declared. “It amuses me! I rather like it!”

“I should think you did!” he retorted. “Or, if you don’t, you ought to!”

She surveyed him pensively with round, lacklustre eyes.

“What a long time it is!” she said—“What a long, long time since you were thin!—really quite thin, James! Do you remember? When you proposed to me in father’s dining-room and the parlour-maid came in and lit the gas, just as you were going to——”

“You seem very reminiscent this morning,” interrupted her husband, sharply. “Do white flannels move you to sentiment?”