“My son, … my son?—I shall answer for myself to my son.—Nay, what account have I to render to my son! A beardless boy, shall he come between us?… Diana, your eyes have lied a thousand times, or you love me!… That promise to Harry was no promise, wrested from you, from me, because of a white face, pleading, because of a red wound! And, if he be true flesh of mine, he will have none of you, your heart being another’s.—Why, my dear,”—his voice changed,—“think you Harry will ever have his bride, will ever see his father again?” So long as his eye flamed, as his voice harshly chid her, she felt strong. But against that note of tenderness she weakened. A sense of physical failing came over her; she thought of the moment when, in the darkness of the garden, she had awakened to find herself in his arms.… Perhaps, in truth, death was very near to them. To slip from the moorings of life, on the tide of his great love—ah, he had said it; it would be sweet! She clasped her hands to her breast; but at the touch of Lionel’s gold bauble, something in herself that Rockhurst’s words had lulled, started into vivid life again; something that would not let her accept the easier course. If death were, even at this moment, gloating upon them, the better reason to look on it with loyal eyes. Were Harry indeed fated never to meet bride or father again, then must father and bride remain sacred in noble memory! And not because she and Rockhurst were so fain to break it, was a promise less binding a promise. One sentence of Lionel’s rang in her ear: “Behold, the end is not difficult to guess”—and with it the echo of her own voice crying back to him, “Oh, foul-mouthed!” Quickly she made her choice; and, brave in her pain, had a smile as she turned to speak. “Once, my lord, you saved me, when I scarce knew myself in danger. To-day it is given to me to pay my debt. And I save you. Give me your arm again, kind, beloved friend, and through the hot contamination of these streets, as once through the pure snow, bring me to honourable shelter.” For a second, the unexpected check, the unlooked-for strength of her resistance, kept him silent. Then gently, as if to an unreasonable child:— “And to what shelter? Poor Diana!” Her smile took something of the divine, maternal pity which lurks in every good woman’s heart for the man she loves. “But a stone’s throw from this place, my dear lord,—her Majesty’s House of the Blue Nuns will not refuse to open its doors to me,—as, indeed, I should have minded me sooner.” She rose, and moved steadily toward the door, striving to seem as though she had no fear of his arresting her. But before she had time to raise the latch, his clasp of iron was on her wrist. A cry rising from the street drove them apart like a sword:— “Father—father!” They looked at each other with starting eyes, blanched cheeks. Then the cry rose again:— “My lord,—my Lord Rockhurst!—father, are you within?”