Max had cared all the time—­cared still!  It was written in the lines of suffering on his face, in the quiet endurance of the close-shut mouth.  Despite the bitter, pitiful misunderstandings of their married life, despite his inexplicable friendship for Adrienne, despite all that had gone before, Diana was sure, in the light of this larger understanding which had come to her, that through it all he had loved her.  With an absolute certainty of conviction, she knew that it was her hand which had graved those fresh lines about his mouth, brought that look of calm sadness to his eyes, and the realisation held a strange mingling of exquisite joy and keen anguish.

She hid her face in her hands, hid it from the stars and the shrouding dark, tremulously abashed at the wonderful significance of love.

She almost laughed to think how she had allowed so small a thing as the secret which Max could not tell her to corrode and eat into the heart of happiness.  Looking back from the standpoint she had now gained, it seemed so pitifully mean and paltry, a profanation of the whole inner, hidden meaning of love.

So long as she and Max cared for each other, nothing else mattered, nothing in the whole world.  And the long battle between love and pride—­between love, that had turned her days and nights into one endless ache of longing to return to Max, and pride, that had barred the way inflexibly—­was over, done with.

Love had won, hands down.  She would go back to Max, and all thought that it might be weak-minded of her, humiliating to her self-respect, was swept aside.  Love, the great teacher, had brought her through the dark places where the lesser gods hold sway, out into the light of day, and she knew that to return to Max, to give herself afresh to him, would be the veritable triumph, of love itself.

She would go back, back to the shelter of his love which had been waiting for her all the time, unswerving and unreproaching.  She had read it in his eyes when they had met her own an hour ago.

“I want you—–­body and soul I want you!” he had told her there by the cliffs at Culver.

And she had not given him all her soul.  She had kept back that supreme belief in the beloved which is an integral part of love.  But now, now she would go to him and give with both hands royally—­faith and trust, blindly, as love demanded.

She smiled a little.  Happiness and the haven of Max’s arms seemed very near her just then.

She was very silent as she and Olga Lermontof drove home together from the Embassy, but just at the last, when the limousine stopped at Baroni’s house, she leaned closer to Olga in the semi-darkness, and whispered a little breathlessly:—­

“I’m going back to him, Olga.”

Somehow the mere putting of it into words seemed to give it substance, convert it into an actual fact that could be talked about, just like the weather, or one’s favourite play, or any other commonplace matter which can be spoken of because it has a knowledgeable existence.  And the Russian’s quick “Thank God!” set the seal of assuredness upon it.