“What do you mean?” she demanded hotly.  “Are you implying now that Max is going about under a false name?  I hate your hints!  Always, always you’ve tried to insinuate something against Max. . . .  No!”—­as the Russian endeavoured to free herself from her clasp—­“No!  You shan’t leave this house till you’ve answered my question.  You’ve made an accusation, and you shall prove it—­if I have to bring you face to face with Max himself!”

“I’ve made no accusation—­merely a suggestion that you should ask him who he is.  And as to bringing me face to face with him—­I can assure you”—­there was an inflection of ironical amusement in her light tones—­“no one would be less anxious for such a denouement than Max Errington himself.  Now, good-bye; think over what I’ve said.  And remember”—­mockingly—­“Adrienne de Gervais is a bad friend for the man one loves!”

She flitted through the doorway, and Diana was left to deal as best she might with the innuendo contained in her speech.

“Adrienne de Gervais is a bad friend for the man one loves.”

The phrase seemed to crystallise in words the whole vague trouble that had been knocking at her heart, and she realised suddenly, with a shock of unbearable dismay, that she was jealous—­jealous of Adrienne!  Hitherto, she had not in the least understood the feeling of depression and malaise which had assailed her.  She had only known that she felt restless and discontented when Max was out of her sight, irritated at the amount of his time which Miss de Gervais claimed, and she had ascribed these things to the depth of her love for him!  But now, with a sudden flash of insight, engendered by the Russian’s dexterous suggestion, she realised that it was jealousy, sheer primitive jealousy of another woman that had gripped her, and her young, wholesome, spontaneous nature recoiled in horrified self-contempt at the realisation.

Pobs’ good counsel came back to her mind:  “It seems to me that if you love him, you needs must trust him.”  Ah! but that was uttered in regard to another matter—­the secret which shadowed Max’s life—­and she had trusted him over that, she told herself.  This, this jealousy of another woman, was an altogether different thing, something which had crept insidiously into her heart, and woven its toils about her almost before she was aware of it.

And behind it all there loomed a new terror.  Olga Lermontof’s advice:  “Ask him who he is,” beat at the back of her brain, fraught with fresh mystery, the forerunner of a whole host of new suspicions.

Secrecy and concealment of any kind were utterly alien to Diana’s nature.  Impulsive, warm-hearted, quick-tempered, she was the last woman in the world to have been thrust by an unkind fate into an atmosphere of intrigue and mystery.  She was like a pretty, fluttering, summer moth, caught in the gossamer web of a spider—­terrified, struggling, battling against something she did not understand, and utterly without the patience and strong determination requisite to free herself.