She laid her hand caressingly on the sun-warmed surface of the rock. How many things had happened since she had last leaned against its uncomfortable excrescences! She felt quite affectionately towards it, as one who has journeyed far may feel towards some old landmark of his youth which he finds unaltered on his return, from wandering in strange lands. The immutability of _things_, as compared with the constant fluctuation of life and circumstance, struck her poignantly. Here was this rock--cast up from the bowels of the earth thousands of years ago and washed by the waves of a million tides--still unchanged and changeless, while, for her, the face of the whole world had altered in little more than a year! From a young girl-student, one insignificant person among scores of others similarly insignificant, she had become a prominent personality, some one in whom even the great, busy, hurrying world paused to take an interest, and of whom the newspapers wrote eulogistic notices, heralding her as the coming English _prima donna_. She felt rather like a mole which has been working quietly in the dark, tunnelling a passage for itself, unseen and unsuspected, and which has suddenly emerged above the surface of the earth, much to its own--and every one else's--astonishment! Then, too, how utterly changed were her relations with Max Errington! At the beginning of their acquaintance he had held himself deliberately aloof, but since that evening at Adrienne de Gervais' house, when they had formed a compact of friendship, he had, apparently, completely blotted out from his mind the remembrance of the obstacle, whatever it might be, which he had contended must render any friendship between them out of the question. And during these last few months Diana had gradually come to know the lofty strain of idealism which ran through the man's whole nature. Passionate, obstinate, unyielding--he could be each and all in turn, but, side by side with these exterior characteristics, there ran a streak of almost feminine delicacy of perception and ideality of purpose. Diana had once told him, laughingly, that he was of the stuff of which martyrs were made in the old days of persecution, and in this she had haphazard lit upon the fundamental force that shaped his actions. The burden which fate, or his own deeds, might lay upon his shoulders, that he would bear, be it what it might. "Everything's got to be paid for," he had said one day. "It's inevitable. So what's the use of jibing at the price?" Diana wondered whether the price of that mysterious something which lay in his past, and which not even intimate friendship had revealed to her, would mean that this comradeship must always remain only that--and never anything more?