“My dear,” she said, and the keen old eyes were suddenly blurred and dim.  “I want to thank you.  One is apt to forget—­when one is very lonely—­that we’ve most of us worn love’s crown just once—­if only for a few moments of our lives. . . .  And it’s good to be reminded of it, even though it may hurt a little.”

“That was the Dowager Duchess of Linfield,” murmured Olga, when the old lady had moved away again.  “They say she was madly in love with an Italian opera singer in the days of her youth.  But, of course, at that time he was quite unknown and altogether ineligible, so she married the late Duke, who was old enough to be her father.  By the time he died the opera singer was dead, too.”

That was Diana’s first taste of the power of a beautiful voice to unlock the closed chambers of the heart where lie our hidden memories—­the long pain of years, sometimes unveiled to those whose gifts appeal directly to the emotions.  It sobered her a little.  This, then, she thought, this leaf of rue that seemed to bring the sadness of the world so close, was interwoven with the crown of laurel.

“Won’t you say how do you do to me, Miss Quentin?  I’ve been deputed by Miss de Gervais to see that you have some supper after breaking all our hearts with your singing.”

Diana, roused from her thoughts, looked up to see Max Errington regarding her with the old, faintly amused mockery in his eyes.

She shook hands.

“I don’t believe you’ve got a heart to break,” she retorted, smiling.

“Oh, mine was broken long before I heard you sing.  Otherwise I would not answer for the consequences of that sad little song of yours.  What is it called?”

“‘The Haven of Memory,’” replied Diana, as Errington skilfully piloted her to a small table standing by itself in an alcove of the supper-room.

“What a misleading name!  Wouldn’t ‘The Hell of Memory’ be more appropriate—­more true to life?”

“I suppose,” answered Diana soberly, “that it might appear differently to different people.”

“You mean that the garden of memory may have several aspects—­like a house?  I’m afraid mine faces north.  Yours, I expect, is full of spring flowers”—­smiling a little quizzically.

“With the addition of a few weeds,” she answered.

“Weeds?  Surely not?  Who planted them there?” His keen, penetrating eyes were fixed on her face.

Diana was silent, her fingers trifling nervously with the salt in one of the little silver cruets, first piling it up into a tiny mound, and then flattening it down again and patterning its surface with criss-cross lines.

There was no one near.  In the alcove Errington had chosen, the two were completely screened from the rest of the room by a carved oak pillar and velvet curtains.

He laid his hand over the restless fingers, holding them in a sure, firm clasp that brought back vividly to her mind the remembrance of that day when he had helped her up the steps of the quayside at Crailing.