The old frumps, whom it was amusing to shock, would be more shocked than ever; while the younger spirits, who acclaimed her already, would hail her more loudly than ever: "Diana! Victress! Queen!"

And all this she undoubtedly owed to David, who had made her his—

Then suddenly she found herself confronted by that which, ever since the motor started, she had been fighting resolutely into her mental background; a quiet retrospection of the moment of her parting with David.

Brought face to face with it, by the chance mention of one word, Diana at once—giving up fencing with side issues, past and future—turned and faced this problem of the present. Brave at all times, she was not a coward when alone.

She took off her hat, rested her head against the soft springiness of the padded back of her motor; closed her eyes, and pressed both hands tightly against her breast.

David had said: "Good-bye, my wife." It was the name he meant to use in all his letters. "Good-bye, my wife."

*

It now seemed to Diana that the happenings of that whole day had been moving toward that culminating moment, when David's deep tender voice should call her his wife; yet he had not done so, until only a narrow shifting plank, on which her feet already stood, lay between them, and a last earthly farewell.

Diana had sped down the gangway; and when her feet touched the wharf she had fled to her car, without looking back; knowing that if she looked back, and saw David's earnest eyes watching her from the top, his boyish figure standing, slim and erect—she would have turned and rushed back up the gangway, caught his hand to her breast, and asked him to say those words again. And, if David had called her his wife again—in that tone which made all things sway and reel around her, and fortune, home, friends, position seem as nothing to the fact that she was that to him—she could never have let go his hand again. They must have remained forever on the same side of the gangway; either she sailing with David to Central Africa, or David returning with her to Riverscourt.

Yet she did not want to go to Africa; and she certainly did not want David at Riverscourt! Her whole plan of life was to reign supreme in her own possessions, mistress of her home, mistress of her time, and, most important of all, mistress of herself.

Then what was the meaning of this strange disturbance in the hitherto unruffled calm of her inner being? What angel had come down, on lightning wing, to trouble the still waters of her deepest self?