“Tell me what I can do, Max?”

A smile curved his lips, half whimsical, half sad.

“You can do for me what you do for all the rest of the world—­I won’t ask more of you,” he replied.  “Sing to me.”

Diana coloured warmly.  The first part of his speech stung her unbearably.

“Sing to you?” she repeated.

“Yes.  I’m very tired, and nothing is more restful than music.”  Then, as she hesitated, he added, “Unless, of course, I’m asking too much.”

“You know you are not,” she answered swiftly.

She resumed her place at the piano, and, while he lay back in his chair with closed eyes, she sang to him—­the music of the old masters who loved melody, and into whose songs the bitterness and unrest of the twentieth century had not crept.

Presently, she thought, he slept, and very softly her hands strayed into the simple, sorrowful music of “The Haven of Memory,” and a note of wistful appeal, not all of art, added a new depth to the exquisite voice.

  How once your love
    But crowned and blessed me only,
      Long and long ago.

The refrain died into silence, and Diana, looking up, found Max’s piercing blue eyes fixed upon her.  He was not asleep, then, after all.

He smiled slightly as their glances met.

“Do you remember I once told you I thought ‘The Hell of Memory’ would be a more appropriate title? . . .  I was quite right.”

“Max—­” Diana’s voice quavered and broke.

A sudden eager light sprang into his face.  Swiftly he same to her side and stood looking down at her.

“Diana,” he said tensely, “must it always remain—­the hell of memory?”

They were very near to each other in that moment; the great wall fashioned of jealousy and distrust was tottering to its foundations.

And then, from the street below came the high-pitched, raucous sound of the newsboy’s voice:—­

“Attempted Murder of Miss Adrian Jervis!  Premier Theatre Besieged.”

The words, with their deadly import, cut between husband and wife like a sword.

“Good God!” The exclamation burst from Max with a cry of horror.  In an instant he was out of the room, down the stairs, and running bareheaded along the street in pursuit of the newsboy, and a few seconds later he was back with a newspaper, damp from the press, in his hands.

Diana had remained sitting just as he had left her.  She felt numbed.  The look of dread and consternation that had leaped into her husband’s face, as the news came shrilling up from the street below, had told her, more eloquently than any words could do, how absolutely his life was bound up in that of Adrienne de Gervais.  A man whose heart’s desire has been suddenly snatched from him might look so; no other.

Max, oblivious of everything else, was reading the brief newspaper account at lightning speed.  At last—­