She achieved a certain feeling of security in the fact that she had made her home with Baroni and his sister.  Signora Evanci mothered her and petted her and fussed over her, much as she did over Baroni himself, and the old maestro, aware of the tangle of Diana’s matrimonial affairs, and ambitious for her artistic future, was likely to do his utmost to avert a meeting between husband and wife—­since emotional crises are apt to impair the voice.

From Baroni’s point of view, the happenings of life were chiefly of importance in so far as they tended towards the perfecting of the artiste.

“Love is good,” he had said on one occasion.  “No one can interpret romantic music who has not loved.  And a broken heart in the past, and plenty of good food in the present—­these may very well make a great artiste.  But a heart that keeps on breaking, that is not permitted to heal itself—­no, that is not good. A la fin, the voice breaks also.”

Hence he regarded his favourite pupil with considerable anxiety.  To his experienced eye it was palpable that the happenings of her married life had tried Diana’s strength almost to breaking point, and that the enthusiasm and energy with which, seeking an anodyne to pain, she had flung herself into her work, would act either one way or the other—­would either finish the job, so that the frayed nerves gave way, culminating in a serious breakdown of her health, or so fill her horizon that the memories of the past gradually receded into insignificance.

The cup of fame, newly held to her lips, could not but prove an intoxicating draught.  There was a rushing excitement, an exhilaration about her life as a well-known public singer, which acted as a constant stimulus.  The enthusiastic acclamations with which she was everywhere received, the adulation that invariably surrounded her, and the intense joy which, as a genuine artist, she derived from the work itself, all acted as a narcotic to the pain of memory, and out of these she tried to build up a new life for herself, a life in which love should have neither part nor lot, but wherein added fame and recognition was to be the ultimate goal.

Her singing had improved; there was a new depth of feeling in her interpretation which her own pain and suffering had taught her, and it was no infrequent thing for part of her audience to be moved to tears, wistfully reminded of some long-dead romance, when she sang “The Haven of Memory”—­a song which came to be associated with her name much in the same way that “Home, Sweet Home” was associated with another great singer, whose golden voice gave new meaning to the familiar words.

Olga Lermontof still remained her accompanist.  For some unfathomed reason she no longer flung out the bitter gibes and thrusts at Errington which had formerly sprung so readily to her lips, and Diana grimly ascribed this forbearance to an odd kind of delicacy—­the generosity of the victor who refuses to triumph openly over the vanquished!