“Haven’t I heard you say that you knew James van Tromp’s nephew, Derek Pruyn?”

“I did know him,” Diane answered, with a trace of hesitation.

“You knew him well?”

“Not exactly; it was different from—­well.”

“Different?  How?  Did you meet him often?”

“Never often; but when we did meet—­”

The possibilities implied in Diane’s pause induced Mrs. Eveleth to turn in her chair and look at her.

“You’ve never told me about that.”

“There wasn’t much to tell.  Don’t you know what it is to have met, just a few times in your life, some one who leaves behind a memory out of proportion to the degree of the acquaintance?  It was something like that with this Mr. Pruyn.”

“Where was it?  In Paris?”

“I met him first in Ireland.  He was staying with some friends of ours the last year mamma and I lived at Kilrowan.  What I remember about him was that he seemed so young to be a widower—­scarcely more than a boy.”

“Is that all?”

“It’s very nearly all; but there is something more.  He said one day when we were talking intimately—­we always seemed to talk intimately when we were together—­that if ever I was in trouble, I was to remember him.”

“How extraordinary!”

“Yes, it was.  I reminded him of it when we met again.  That was the year I was going out with Marie de Nohant, just before George and I were married.”

“And what did he say then?”

“That he repeated the request.”

“Extraordinary!” Mrs. Eveleth commented again.  “Are you going to do anything about it?”

“I’ve thought of it,” Diane admitted, “but I don’t believe I can.”

“Wouldn’t it be a pity to neglect so good an opportunity?”

“It might rather be a pity to avail one’s self of it.  There are things in life too pleasant to put to the test.”

“He might like you to do it.  After all, he’s a connection.”

Not caring to continue the subject, Diane murmured something about feeling cold, and rose for a little exercise.  Having advanced as far forward as she could go, she turned her back upon her fellow-passengers, stretched in mute misery in their chairs or huddled in cheerful groups behind sheltering projections, and stood watching the dip and rise of the steamer’s bow as it drove onward into the mist.  Whither was she going, and to what?  With a desperate sense of her ignorance and impotence, she strained her eyes into the white, dimly translucent bank, from which stray drops repeatedly lashed her face, as though its vaporous wall alone stood between her and the knowledge of her future.

* * * * *

If she could have seen beyond the fog and carried her vision over the intervening leagues of ocean, so as to look into a large, old-fashioned New York house in Gramercy Park, she would have found Derek Pruyn and Lucilla van Tromp discussing one of the cardinal points on which that future was to turn.