“On my return I shall ask my father’s consent to make Lydia my wife. Should success attend our arms it will be a propitious moment to win a hearing, and I want you to use your influence, which is great, to plead my cause. My father is ambitious; greatly as he is attached to me, I am by no means certain that his sanction will be easily gained. From the first moment that my eyes rested upon the English captive I have loved her. All through the winter before I met her I had passed through toil and danger and carnage, and then that summer day her tender presence dawned upon me like some star of peace and repose. You, too, have been won by her sweetness. It was together we rescued her, remember, Diane. I never loved you so dearly as when I watched your tender care of the helpless stranger cast upon your mercy. She has the gift of winning all hearts. For my sake I would ask you to protect and care for my treasure.” Du Chesne was so completely engrossed by his own thoughts and feelings that he paid but slight attention to his companion. Diane’s rich color had given place to a strange excited pallor. She looked at him with the wild, hunted eyes of some desperate animal at bay. The world was suddenly upheaving beneath her feet, and her heart stood still as the keenness and sharpness of the shock crushed the spirit within her. Oh, Heaven! not later than yesterday she had been as a queen, graciously dispensing her favors, smiling tolerantly at Lydia’s petty vanities and weaknesses—Lydia, who had come into her life as a stranger, stirring it to its very foundations, robbing it of peace and happiness, leaving her in return the blank of a great desolation—Lydia, whom she had protected and cherished, who owed all to her generosity. Now a flash of lightning had come out of the apparently cloudless sky, smiting her from her pedestal, precipitating her into this awful void in which every wretchedness was conceivable. Others had not been as blind as herself. She remembered her aunt’s sarcasm, the hints Nanon had given her, the ill-will to the English girl Cecile de St. Rochs had so often openly expressed. The glare of illumination was intolerable, bringing with it a galling, insupportable mortification. As these bitter truths flashed upon her, Diane clenched her hands, flushing into a sudden rage of bitter humiliation. “Diane, you are surely not surprised? I thought that you, who are so quick, would have divined my feeling from the first. I fancied that your kindness to Lydia was inspired by friendship for me, as well as delight in her charms.”