Once outside in the cool shelter of the balcony, dimly lit by swaying Chinese lanterns, Diana sank into a chair, shaken and unnerved. For an instant her eyes strayed back to where, through the open French window, she could see Max still conversing with the Ambassador, but she averted them swiftly. The change in him hurt her like the sudden stab of a knife. His face was worn and lined; there was something ascetic-looking in the hollowed line from cheek-bone to chin and in the stern, austere closing of the lips, while the eyes--the mocking blue eyes with the laughter always lurking at the back of them--held an expression of deep, unalterable sadness. "Olga!" The word broke from Diana's white lips like a cry of appeal, tremulous and uncertain. But Miss Lermontof made no response. She seemed quite unmoved by the distress of the woman sitting huddled in the chair before her, and her light green eyes shone with a curious savage glint like the eyes of a cat. Diana spoke again nervously. "Are you--angry with me?" "Angry!" The Russian almost spat out the word. "Angry! Don't you see what you're doing?" "What I'm doing?" repeated Diana. "What am I doing?" Olga replied with a grim incisiveness. "You're killing Max--that's all. This--this is going to break him--break him utterly." There was a long silence, and the dewy dusk of the night, shaken into pearly mist where the flickering light of the Chinese lanterns illumined it, seemed to close round the two women, like a filmy curtain, shutting them off from the chattering throng in the adjoining room. Presently a cart rattled past in the street below, rasping the tense silence. Diana lifted her head. "I didn't know!" she said helplessly. "I didn't know! . . ." "And yet you professed to love him!" Olga spoke consideringly, an element of contemptuous wonder in her voice. The memory of words that Max had uttered long ago stirred in Diana's mind. "_You don't know what love means!_" Limned against the darkness she could see once more the sun-warmed beach at Culver Point, the blue, sparkling sea with the white gulls wheeling above it, and Max--Max standing tall and straight beside her, with a shaft of sunlight flickering across his hair, and love illimitable in his eyes. "You don't know what love means!" The words penetrated to her innermost consciousness, cleaving their way sheer through the fog of doubt and mistrust and pride as the sharp blade of the surgeon's knife cuts deep into a festering wound. And before their clarifying, essential truth, Diana's soul recoiled in dumb dismay. No, she hadn't known what love meant--love, which, with an exquisite unreasonableness, believes when there is ground for doubt--hadn't understood it as even this cynical, bitter-tongued Russian understood it. And she recognised the scorn on Olga's white, contemptuous face as the unlovely sheath of an ideal of love immeasurably beyond her own achieving.