“I suppose it will have to be he—­or some one else.  They keep at me.”

“And you don’t know how long you may be able to hold out.”

“I’m holding out as well as I can,” she laughed, “but it can’t go on forever.  And then—­if I do—­”

“Well—­what?”

“You’d be left all alone, and, of course, I should be worried about that—­unless you—­you—­”

“Unless I married some one.”

“No; not some one; no one—­but Diane.”

They were now at their own door, but before she sprang out she drew down his face to hers and kissed him.

IX

During the succeeding week Derek Pruyn, having practically announced an engagement which did not exist, found himself in a somewhat ludicrous situation.  Too proud to extort a promise of secrecy from Mrs. Bayford, he knew the value of his indiscretion—­if indiscretion it were—­to any purveyor of tea-table gossip; and while Diane and he remained in the same relative positions he was sure it was being bruited about, with his own authority, that they were to become man and wife.  It did not diminish the absurdity of the situation that he was debarred from proposing and settling the affair at once by the grotesque fact that he actually had not time.

There was certainly little opportunity for lovemaking in those hurried days of preparing for his long absence in South America.  He was often obliged to leave home by eight in the morning, rarely returning except to go wearily to bed.  Though nothing had been said to him, he had more than one reason for suspecting that Mrs. Bayford was at work; and, at the odd minutes when he saw Diane, it seemed to him as if her clearness of look was extinguished by an expression of perplexity.

He would have reproached himself more keenly for his lack of energy in overcoming obstacles had it not been for the fact that, owing to their peculiar position as members of one household, and that household his, he was planning to ask Diane to become his wife on that occasion when he would also be bidding her adieu.  She would thus be spared the difficulties of a trying situation, while she would have the season of his absence in which to adjust her mind to the revolution in her life.  He resolved to adhere to this intention, the more especially as a small family dinner at Gramercy Park, from which he was to go directly to his steamer, would give him the exact combination of circumstances he desired.

When, after dinner, Miss Lucilla’s engineering of the company allowed him to find himself alone with Diane in the library, he made her sit down by the fireside, while he stood, his arm resting on the mantelpiece, as on the afternoon of their first serious interview, over a year before.  As on that other occasion, so, too, on this, she sat erect, silent, expectant, waiting for him to speak.  What was coming she did not know; but she felt once more his commanding dominance, with its power to ordain, prescribe, and regulate the conditions of her life.