Last night, the sight of her husband and the actress, standing together on the stage, had seemed to her to epitomise their relative positions--Max and Adrienne, working together, fully in each other's confidence, whilst she herself was the outsider, only the onlooker in the box! "Well?" she said, defiantly turning to her husband. "Well? What is it you wish to say to me?" "I want an explanation of your conduct--last night." "And I," she retorted impetuously, "I want an explanation of your conduct--ever since we've been married!" He swept her demand aside as though it were the irresponsible prattle of a child, ignored it utterly. He was conscious of only one thing--that she had barred herself away from him, humiliated him, dealt their mutual love a blow beneath which it reeled. The bolted door itself counted for nothing. What mattered was that it was she who had closed it, deliberately choosing to shut him outside her life, and cutting every cord of love and trust and belief that bound them together. An Englishman might have stormed or laughed, as the mood took him, and comforted himself with the reflection that she would "get over it." But not so Max. The sensitiveness which he hid from the world at large, but which revealed itself in the lines of that fine-cut mouth of his, winced under the humiliation she had put upon him. Love, in his idea, was a thing so delicate, so rare, that Diana's crude handling of the situation bore for him a far deeper meaning than the impulsive, headlong action of the over-wrought girl had rightly held. To Max, it signified the end--the denial of all the exquisite trust and understanding which love should represent. If she could think for an instant that he would have asked aught from her at a moment when they were so far apart in spirit, then she had not understood the ideal oneness of body and soul which love signified to him, and the knowledge that she had actually sought to protect herself from him had hurt him unbearably. "Last night," he said slowly, "you showed me that you have no trust, no faith in me any longer." And Diana, misunderstanding, thinking of the secret which he would not share with her, and impelled by the jealousy that obsessed her, replied impetuously:-- "Yes, I meant to show you that. You refuse me your confidence, and expect me to believe in you! You set me aside for Adrienne de Gervais, and then you ask me to--_trust_ you? How can I? . . . I'm not a fool, Max." "So it's that? The one thing over which I asked your faith?" The limitless scorn in his voice lashed her. "You had no right to ask it!" she broke out bitterly. "Oh, you knew what it would mean. I, I was too young to realise. I didn't think--I didn't understand what a horrible thing a secret between husband and wife might be. But I can't bear it--I can't bear it any longer! I sometimes wonder," she added slowly, "if you ever loved me?"