“You forget!” she said--“You forget that I am old! I am not really young in the sense you expect me to be. I know myself. Deep in my brain the marks of lonely years and griefs are imprinted--of disappointed hopes, and cruelties inflicted on me for no other cause than too much love and constancy--those marks are ineffaceable! So it happens that beneath the covering of youth which your science gives me, and under the mark of this outward loveliness, I, the same Diana, live with a world’s experience, as one in prison,--knowing that whatever admiration or liking I may awaken, it is for my outward seeming, not for my real self! And you can talk of love! Love is a divinity of the soul, not of the body!” “And how many human beings have ‘soul,’ do you think?” he queried, ironically. “Not one in ten million!” The boat ran in to shore and they landed. Diana looked back wistfully at the rippling light on the water. “It was a beautiful sail!” she said, more naturally than she had expressed herself for many days. “Thank you for taking me!” She smiled frankly up into his eyes as she spoke, and her spiritualised loveliness thrilled him with sudden surprise. “It is I who must thank you for coming,” he answered, very gently. “I know how keenly you are now attuned to Nature--you have the light of the sun in your blood and force of the air in your veins, and whether you admit it or not, you enjoy your life without consciousness of joy! Strange!--but true!--yet--Diana--believe me, I want you to be happy!--not only to ‘suppose’ yourself happy! Your whole being must radiate like the sunlight, of which it is now in part composed.” She made no reply, but walked in her floating, graceful way beside him to the house, where he took her to the door of her own apartments, and there left her with a kindly “good-night.” “I shall not see very much of you now till the evening of the twentieth,” he said. “And then I hope you will not only pray for yourself, but--for me!” CHAPTER XIX The fated eve,--eve of the longest day in the year,--came in a soft splendour of misty violet skies and dimly glittering stars--after lovely hours of light and warmth which had bathed all nature in radiant summer glory from earliest dawn till sunset. Diana had risen with the sun itself in the brightest of humours without any forebodings of evil or danger resulting from the trial to which she was ready to be subjected, and when Madame Dimitrius came up to spend the afternoon with her as usual, she was gayer and more conversational than she had been for many a day. It was Madame who seemed depressed and anxious, and Diana, looking quite charming in her simple gown of white batiste with a bunch of heliotrope at her bosom, rather rallied her on her low spirits.