Diana’s gaze wandered idly over the blue stretch of water, as it lay beneath the blazing August sun, while the sea-gulls, like streaks of white light, wheeled through the shimmering haze of the atmosphere.  Her hands were loosely clasped around her knees, and a little evanescent smile played about her lips.  Behind her, the great red cliffs of Culver Point reared up against the sapphire of the sky, and she was thinking dreamily of that day, nearly eighteen months ago, when she had been sitting in the self-same place, leaning against the self-same rock, whilst a grey waste of water crept hungrily up to her very feet, threatening to claim her as its prey.  And then Errington had come, and straightway all the danger was passed.

Looking back, it seemed as though that had always been the way of things.  Some menace had arisen, either by land or sea—­or even, as at her recital, out of the very intensity of feeling which her singing had inspired—­and immediately Max had intervened and the danger had been averted.

She laid her hand caressingly on the sun-warmed surface of the rock.  How many things had happened since she had last leaned against its uncomfortable excrescences!  She felt quite affectionately towards it, as one who has journeyed far may feel towards some old landmark of his youth which he finds unaltered on his return, from wandering in strange lands.  The immutability of things, as compared with the constant fluctuation of life and circumstance, struck her poignantly.  Here was this rock—­cast up from the bowels of the earth thousands of years ago and washed by the waves of a million tides—­still unchanged and changeless, while, for her, the face of the whole world had altered in little more than a year!

From a young girl-student, one insignificant person among scores of others similarly insignificant, she had become a prominent personality, some one in whom even the great, busy, hurrying world paused to take an interest, and of whom the newspapers wrote eulogistic notices, heralding her as the coming English prima donna.  She felt rather like a mole which has been working quietly in the dark, tunnelling a passage for itself, unseen and unsuspected, and which has suddenly emerged above the surface of the earth, much to its own—­and every one else’s—­astonishment!

Then, too, how utterly changed were her relations with Max Errington!  At the beginning of their acquaintance he had held himself deliberately aloof, but since that evening at Adrienne de Gervais’ house, when they had formed a compact of friendship, he had, apparently, completely blotted out from his mind the remembrance of the obstacle, whatever it might be, which he had contended must render any friendship between them out of the question.