to the process.  When you’re a little older, when, perhaps, you have children of your own, you’ll understand better what I’ve done for you to-night; and you won’t use toward my memory the tone of semi-jocular disdain that has entered into nearly every word you’ve addressed to me this evening.  Now, if you’ll excuse me,” she added, wearily, “I think I’ll go in.  I’m very tired, and I’ll rest till Dorothea comes.  When she arrives you must bring her to me directly; and she must stay with me till I take her to—­the wedding.  My room is the first door on the left of the main entrance.”

She was half-way across the terrace when he called out to her, the boyish tremor in his voice more accentuated than before.

“Wait a minute.  There’s lots of time.”  She came back a few paces toward him.  “Shouldn’t I look very grotesque if I hooked it?”

“Not half so grotesque as you’ll look to-morrow morning when you have to go back to town and tell every one you meet that you and Dorothea Pruyn have run away and got married.  That’s when you’ll look foolish and cut a pathetic figure.  As things are it could be kept between two or three of us; but if you go on, you’ll be in all the papers by to-morrow afternoon.  Of course your mother knows?”

“I suppose so; I wired when I thought it was too late for her to spread the alarm.  But I don’t mind about her.  She’ll be only too glad to have me back at any price.”

“Then—­I’d go.”

The light from the hotel was full on his face, and she could almost have kissed him for his doleful, crestfallen expression.

“Well—­I will.”

There was no heroism in the way in which he said the words, and the spring disappeared from his walk as he went back to the hotel to pay his bill and order out his “machine.”  Diane smiled to herself to see how his head drooped and his shoulders sagged, but her eyes blinked at the mist that rose before them.  After all, he was little more than a schoolboy, and he and Dorothea were but two children at play.

She did not continue her own way into the hotel.  Now that the first part of her purpose in coming had been accomplished, she was free to remember what the comedy with Carli had almost excluded from her mind—­that within an hour or two Derek Pruyn and she might be face to face again.  The thought made her heart leap as with sudden fright.  Fortunately, Dorothea would have arrived by that time, and would stand between them, otherwise the mere possibility would have been overwhelming.

Yes; Dorothea ought to be coming soon.  She looked at her watch, and found it was nearly eleven.  On the stillness of the night there came a sound, a clatter, a whiz, a throb—­the unmistakable noise of an automobile.  She hurried to the end of the terrace; but it was not Dorothea coming; it was Carli going away.  She breathed more freely, standing to see him pass, and knowing that he was really gone.