"Now I have seen you again, I declare I don't wonder at anything. I was inclined to quarrel with him, you know, thinking it was just a boyish foolish fancy that he ought to get over; I was a little out of patience with him; but now I see you, I take it all back. I declare, you're a woman the men might rave about. You mustn't mind if they do." "There is another question, whether my husband will mind." She said the words with a hard, relentless force upon herself. "Is he jealous?" laughing. "He has no reason." "Reason! O, people are jealous without reason; they don't wait for that. Better without than with. How is Mr. Masters? is he one of that kind? And how came he to marry you?" "You ought not to wonder at it, with the opinion you have expressed of me." "O no, I don't wonder at all! But somebody else wanted to marry you too; and somebody else thought he had the best right. I am afraid you flirted with him. Or was it with Mr. Masters you flirted? I didn't think you were a girl to flirt; but I see! You would keep just quietly still, and they would flutter round you, like moths round a candle, and it would be their own fault if they both got burned. Has Mr. Masters got burned? My poor moth has singed his wings badly, I can tell you. I am very sorry for him." "So am I," Diana said gravely. "Are you? Are you really? Are you sorry for him? May I tell him you are sorry?" "You have not said whom you are talking about," Diana answered, with a coldness which she wondered at when she said it. "O, but you know! There is only one person I could be talking about. There is only one I could care enough about to be talking for him. You cannot help but know. May I tell him you say you are sorry for him? It would be a sort of comfort, and he wants it." "You must ask Mr. Masters." "What?" "That." "Whether I may tell Evan you are sorry for him?" "Whether you may tell that to anybody." "I don't want to tell it to but one," said Mrs. Reverdy, laughing. "What has Mr. Masters to do with it?" "He is my husband." And calmly as Diana said it, she felt as if she would like to shriek out the words to the birds on the hillside--to the angels, if there were angels in the air. Yet she said it calmly. "But do you ask your husband about everything you do or say?" "If I think he would not like it." "But that is giving him a great deal of power,--too much. Husband's are fallible, as well as wives," said Mrs. Reverdy, laughing. "Mr. Masters is not fallible. At least, I never saw him fail in anything. If he ever made a mistake, it was when he married me." "And you?" said Mrs. Reverdy. "Didn't you make a mistake too?" "In marrying somebody so much too good for me--yes," Diana answered. The little woman was a good deal baffled. "Then have you really no kind word for Evan? must I tell him so?"