“Yes,--it is a thousand pities I was ever given such a name,” she said. “If I were a Martha, a Deborah or a Sarah, it would suit me much better. But Diana! It suggests a beautiful young woman----” “You were young once!” he suggested, meaningly. “Ah, yes, once!” and she sighed. “Once is a long time ago!” “I never regret youth,” said Madame Dimitrius. “My age has been much happier and more peaceful. I would not go back to my young days.” “That is because you have fulfilled your particular destiny,” interposed her son,--“You fell in love with my father--what happy times they must have been when the first glamour of attraction drew you both to one another!--you married him,--and I am the result! Dearest mother, there was nothing more for you to do, with your devoted and gentle nature! You became the wife of a clever man,--he died, having fulfilled _his_ destiny in giving you--may I say so?--a clever son,--myself! What more can any woman ask of ordinary nature?” He laughed gaily, and putting his arm round his mother, fondled her as if she were a child. “Yes, beloved!--you have done all your duty!” he went on. “But you have sacrificed your own identity--the thing that Miss Diana calls her ‘significance.’ You lost that willingly when you married--all women lose it when they marry:--and you have never quite found it again. But you _will_ find it! The slow process of evolution will make of you a ‘fine spirit’ when the husk of material life is cast off for wider expansion.” As he spoke, Diana looked at mother and son with the odd sense of being an outside spectator of two entirely unconnected identities,--the one overpowering and shadowing the other, but wholly unrelated and more or less opposed in temperament. Madame Dimitrius was distinguished by an air of soft and placid dignity, made sympathetic by a delicate touch of lassitude indicative of age and a desire for repose, while Féodor Dimitrius himself gave the impression of a strong energy restrained and held within bounds as a spirited charger is reined and held in by his rider, and, above all, of a man aware of his own possibilities and full of set resolve to fulfil them. “Is that embroidery of a very pressing nature?” he suddenly said, then, with a smile. “Or do you think you could spare a few moments away from it?” She at once put aside her frame and rose. “Did I not ask you when you came in if you wanted me?” she queried. “Somehow I was quite sure you did! You know I am always ready to serve you if I can.” He still had one arm round his mother,--but he raised his eyes and fixed them on Diana with an expression which was to her new and strange. “I know you are!” he said, slowly. “And I shall need your service in a difficulty--very soon! But not just now. I have only a few things to say which I think should not be put off till to-morrow. We’ll go into the library and talk there.” He bent down and kissed his mother’s snowy and still luxuriant hair, adding for her benefit: