Outwardly he was an ordinary passenger, smoking quietly in a deck-chair, in order to pass the time between dinner and the hour for “turning in.”  His voice, as he plied Bienville with questions, betrayed his emotions no more than the darkened surface of the sea gave evidence of the raging life within its depths.  To Bienville himself, during these idle, balmy nights, there was a threefold inspiration, which in no case called for strict exactitude of detail.  There was, first, the pleasure of talking about himself; there was, next, the desire to give his career the advantage of a romantic light; and there was, thirdly, the story-teller’s natural instinct to hold his hearer spellbound.  The little more or the little less could not matter to a man whom he didn’t know, in talking about a woman whose name he hadn’t given; while, on the other hand, there was the satisfaction, to which the Latin is so sensitive, of showing himself a lion among ladies.

Moreover, he had boasted of his achievements so often that he had come to believe in them long before giving Derek the detailed account of his victory on the gleaming Caribbean seas.  On his part, Derek had found no difficulty in crediting that which was related with apparent fidelity to fact, and which filled up, in so remarkable a manner, the empty spaces between the mysterious, broken hints Diane had at various times given him of her own inner life.  The one story helped to tell the other as accurately as the fragments of an ancient stele, when put together, make up the whole inscription.  The very independence of the sources from which he drew his knowledge negatived the possibility of doubt.  There was but one way in which Diane could have put herself right with him:  she could have swept the charge aside, with a serene contemptuousness of denial.  Had she done so, her assertion would have found his own eagerness to believe in her ready to meet it half-way.  As it was, alas! her admissions had been damning.  Where she acknowledged the smoke, there surely must have been the fire!  Where she owned to so much culpability, there surely must have been the entire measure of guilt!

For the time being, he forgot Bienville, in order to review the conversation of the last half-hour.  Diane had not carried herself like a woman who had nothing with which to reproach herself; and that a woman should be obliged to reproach herself at all was a humiliation to her womanhood.  In the midst of this gross world, where the man’s soul naturally became stained and coarsened, hers should retain the celestial beauty with which it came forth from God.  That, in his opinion, was her duty; that was her instinct; that was the object with which she had been placed on earth.  A woman who was no better than a man was an error on the part of nature; and Diane—­oh, the pity of it!—­had put herself down on the man’s level with a naivete which showed her unconscious of ever having been higher up.  She had confessed to weaknesses, as though she were of no finer clay than himself, and spoke of being penitent, when the tragedy lay in the fact that a woman should have anything to repent of.