"He is not." Diana's heart suddenly sang within her. "Nor," continued Miss Lermontof keenly, "is there any likelihood of his ever marrying." The song broke off abruptly. "I should have thought," said Diana slowly, "that he was just the kind of man who _would_ marry. He is"--with a little effort--"very delightful." Miss Lermontof got up to go. "You have a saying in England: _All is not gold that glitters_. It is very good sense," she observed. "Do you mean"--Diana's eyes were suddenly apprehensive--"do you mean that he has done anything wrong--dishonourable?" "I think," replied Olga Lermontof incisively, "that it would be very dishonourable of him if he tried to--to make you care for him." She moved towards the door as she spoke, and Diana followed her. "But why--why do you tell me this?" she faltered. The Russian's queer green eyes held an odd expression as she answered:-- "Perhaps it's because I like you very much better than you do me. You're one of the few genuine warm-hearted people I've met--and I don't want you to be unhappy. Good-bye," she added carelessly, "thank you for my tea." The door closed behind her, and Diana, returning to her seat by the fire, sat staring into the flames, puzzling over what she had heard. Miss Lermontof's curious warning had frightened her a little. She apparently possessed some intimate knowledge of the affairs both of Max Errington and Adrienne de Gervais, and what she knew did not appear to be very favourable to either of them. Diana had intuitively felt from the very beginning of her acquaintance with Errington that there was something secret, something hidden, about him, and in a way this had added to her interest in him. It had seized hold of her imagination, kept him vividly before her mind as nothing else could have done, and now Olga Lermontof's strange hints and innuendos gave a fresh fillip to her desire to know in what way Max Errington differed from his fellows. "It would be dishonourable of him to make you care," Miss Lermontof had said. The words seemed to ring in Diana's ears, and side by side with them, as though to add a substance of reality, came the memory of Errington's own bitter exclamation: "I forgot that I'm a man barred out from all that makes life worth living!" She felt as though she had drawn near some invisible web, of which every now and then a single filament brushed against her--almost impalpable, yet touching her with the fleetest and lightest of contacts. During the weeks that followed, Diana became more or less an intimate at Adrienne's house in Somervell Street. The actress seemed to have taken a great fancy to her, and although she was several years Diana's senior, the difference in age formed no appreciable stumbling-block to the growth of the friendship between them.