Pain!  Life seemed made up of pain these days.  Sometimes she wondered how much a single human being was capable of bearing.

It was months—­an eternity—­since she and Max had parted, and still her heart cried out for him, fighting the bitter anger and distrust that had driven her from him.

She felt she could have borne it more easily had he died.  Then the remembrance of his love would still have been hers to hold and keep, something most precious and unspoilt.  But now, each memory of their life together was tarnished with doubt and suspicion and mistrust.  She had put him to the test, bade him choose betwixt her and Adrienne, claiming his confidence as her right—­and he had chosen Adrienne and declined to trust her with his secret.

She told herself that had he loved her, he must have yielded.  No man who cared could have refused her, and the scourge of wounded pride drove her into that outer darkness where bitterness and “proper self-respect” defile the face of Love.

She had turned desperately to her work for distraction from the ceaseless torture of her thoughts, but not all the work in the world had been able to silence the cry of her heart.

For work can do no more than fill the day, and though Diana feverishly crammed each day so full that there was little time to think and remember, the nights remained—­the interminable nights, when she was alone with her own soul, and when the memories which the day’s work had beaten back came pressing in upon her.

Oh, God!  The nights—­the endless, intolerable nights! . . .

CHAPTER XXIV

THE VISION OF LOVE

A week after her visit to Somervell Street, the thing which Diana had dreaded came to pass.

She was attending a reception at the French Embassy, and as she made her way through the crowded rooms, followed by Olga Lermontof—­who frequently added to the duties of accompanist those of dame de compagnie to the great prima donna—­she came suddenly face to face with Max.

To many of us the anticipation of an unpleasant happening is far more agonising than the actual thing itself.  The mind, brooding apprehensively upon what may conceivably occur, exaggerates the possibilities of the situation, enhancing all the disagreeable details, and oblivious of any mitigating circumstances which may, quite probably, accompany it.  There is sound sense and infinite comfort, if you look for it, in the old saying which bids us not to cross our bridges till we come to them.

The fear of the unknown, the unexperienced, is a more haunting, insidious fear than any other, and sometimes one positively longs to hasten the advent of an unwelcome ordeal, in order that the worst may be known and the menace of the future be transformed into a memory of the past.

So it was with Diana.  She had been for so long beset by her fear of the first meeting that she experienced a sensation almost of relief when her eyes fell at last upon the tall figure of her husband.