Jerry and Joan, sensing the antagonism in the atmosphere, endeavoured to make conversation, but their efforts received scant encouragement, and both were thankful when the meal came to an end, and they were free to seek refuge in another room, leaving husband and wife alone together. Diana glanced a trifle nervously at her husband as the door closed behind them. There was a coldness, an aloofness about him, that reminded her vividly of the early days of their acquaintanceship, when his cool indifference of manner had set a barrier between them which her impulsive girlhood had been powerless to break through. "Will you spare me a few minutes in my study?" he said. His face was perfectly impassive; only the peculiar brilliancy of his eyes spoke of the white-hot anger he was holding in leash. Diana nodded silently. For a moment, bereft of words, she quailed before the knowledge of that concentrated anger, but by the time they had reached his study she had pulled herself together, and was ready to face him with a high temper almost equal to his own. She had had the night for reflection, and the sense of bitter injustice under which she was labouring had roused in her the same dogged, unbending obstinacy which, in a much smaller way, had evinced itself when Baroni had thrown the music at her and had subsequently bade her pick it up. But now that sense of wild rebellion against injustice, against personal injury, was magnified a thousandfold. For months she had been drifting steadily apart from her husband, acutely conscious of that secret thing in his life, and fiercely resentful of its imperceptible, yet binding influence on all his actions. Again and again she had been perplexed and mystified by certain incomprehensible things which she had observed--for instance, the fact that, as she knew, part of Max's correspondence was conducted in cipher; that at times he seemed quite unaccountably worried and depressed; and, above all, that he was for ever at the beck and call of Adrienne de Gervais. Gradually she had begun to connect the two things--Adrienne, and that secret which dwelt like a shadowy menace at the back of everything. It was clear, too, that they were also linked together in the minds both of Baroni and Olga Lermontof--a dropped sentence here, a hint there, had assured her of that. Then had come Olga's definite suggestion, "Adrienne de Gervais is a bad friend for the man one loves!" And from that point onward Diana had seen new meanings in all that passed between her husband and the actress, and a blind jealousy had taken possession of her. Something out of the past bound her husband and Adrienne together, of that she felt convinced. She believed that the knowledge which Max had chosen to withhold from her--his wife--he shared with Adrienne--and all Diana's fierce young sense of possession rose up in opposition.