Instinctively she sought to dull the pain at her heart by plunging headlong into professional life.  Her voice, thanks to the rest and change of her visit to Switzerland, had regained all its former beauty, and her return to the concert platform was received with an outburst of popular enthusiasm.  The newspapers devoted half a column apiece to the subject, and several of them prophesied that it was in grand opera that Madame Diana Quentin would eventually find the setting best suited to her gifts.

“Mere concert work”—­wrote one critic—­“will never give her the scope which both her temperament and her marvellous voice demand.”

And with this opinion Baroni cordially concurred.  It was his ultimate ambition for Diana that she should study for grand opera, and she herself, only too thankful to find something that would occupy her thoughts and take her right out of herself, as it were, enabling her to forget the overthrow of her happiness, flung herself into the work with enthusiasm.

Gradually, as time passed on, her bitter feelings towards Max softened a little.  That light, half-ironical manner he had assumed brought back to her so vividly the Max Errington of the early days of their acquaintance that it recalled, too, a measure of the odd attraction he had held for her in that far-away time.

That he still visited Adrienne very frequently she was aware, but often, on his return from Somervell Street, he seemed so much depressed that she began at last to wonder whether those visits were really productive of any actual enjoyment.  Possibly she had misjudged them—­her husband and her friend—­and it might conceivably be really only business matters which bound them together after all.

If so—­if that were true—­how wantonly she had flung away her happiness!

Late one afternoon, Max, who had been out since early morning, came in looking thoroughly worn out.  His eyes, ringed with fatigue, held an alert look of strain and anxiety for which Diana was at a loss to account.

She was at the piano when he entered the room, idly trying over some MS. songs that had been submitted by aspiring composers anxious to secure her interest.

“Why, Max,” she exclaimed, genuine concern in her voice, as she rose from the piano.  “How worried you look!  What is the matter?”

“Nothing,” he returned.  “At least, nothing in which you can help,” he added hastily.  “Unless—­”

“Unless what?  Please . . . let me help . . . if I can.”  Diana spoke rather nervously.  She was suddenly struck by the fact that the last few months had been responsible for a great change in her husband’s appearance.  He looked much thinner and older than formerly, she thought.  There were harassed lines in his face, and its worn contours and shadowed eyes called aloud to the compassionate womanhood within her, to the mother-instinct that involuntarily longs to heal and soothe.