The memory of words that Max had uttered long ago stirred in Diana’s mind.

“You don’t know what love means!”

Limned against the darkness she could see once more the sun-warmed beach at Culver Point, the blue, sparkling sea with the white gulls wheeling above it, and Max—­Max standing tall and straight beside her, with a shaft of sunlight flickering across his hair, and love illimitable in his eyes.

“You don’t know what love means!”

The words penetrated to her innermost consciousness, cleaving their way sheer through the fog of doubt and mistrust and pride as the sharp blade of the surgeon’s knife cuts deep into a festering wound.  And before their clarifying, essential truth, Diana’s soul recoiled in dumb dismay.

No, she hadn’t known what love meant—­love, which, with an exquisite unreasonableness, believes when there is ground for doubt—­hadn’t understood it as even this cynical, bitter-tongued Russian understood it.  And she recognised the scorn on Olga’s white, contemptuous face as the unlovely sheath of an ideal of love immeasurably beyond her own achieving.

The vision of Culver Point faded away, and an impalpable wall of darkness seemed to close about her.  Dimly, as though it were some one else’s voice speaking, she heard herself say slowly:—­

“I thought I loved him.”  Then, after a pause, “Will you go?  Please go.  I should like to be . . . quiet . . . a little while.”

For a moment Olga gazed down at her, eagerly, almost hungrily, as though silently beseeching her.  Then, still silently, she went away.

Diana sat very still.  Above her, the gay-coloured Chinese lanterns swayed to and fro in the little breeze that drifted up the street, and above again, far off in the sombre sky, the stars looked down—­pitiless, unmoved, as they have looked down through all the ages upon the pigmy joys and sufferings of humanity.

For the first time Diana was awake to the limitations she had set to love.

The meeting with her husband had shaken her to the very foundations of her being, the shock of his changed appearance sweeping away at a single blow the whole fabric of artificial happiness that she had been trying to build up.

She had thought that the wound in her heart would heal, that she could teach herself to forget the past.  And lo!  At the first sight of his face the old love and longing had reawakened with a strength she was powerless to withstand.

The old love, but changed into something immeasurably more than it had ever been before, and holding in its depths a finer understanding.  And with this clearer vision came a sudden new knowledge—­a knowledge fraught with pain and yet bearing deep within it an unutterable sense of joy.