“Ah, Diana, it is a pity you were never made a happy wife and mother!” she said, softly. “I thought so too,--once!” and Diana laughed carelessly--“But I’m sure I’m much better off as I am! Now, dear, we’ll part for the present. I want to rest a little--and to say my prayers--before Dr. Féodor sends for me.” Madame at once rose to leave the room. But, before doing so, she took Diana in her arms and kissed her tenderly. “God bless and guard thee, dear child!” she murmured. “Thou art brave and loyal, and I have grown to love thee! If Féodor should bring thee to harm, he is no son of mine!” For a moment the solitary-hearted, unloved woman felt a thrill of pleasure in this simple expression of affection,--the real sensation of youth filled her veins, as if she were a confiding girl with her mother’s arms about her, and something like tears sprang to her eyes. But she suppressed the emotion quickly. Smiling and apparently unmoved, she let the gentle old lady go from her, and watched her to the last as she moved with the careful step of age along the entresol and out through the entrance to the head of the staircase, where she disappeared. Once alone, Diana stood for a few moments lost in thought. She knew instinctively that her life was at stake,--Dimitrius had reached the final test of his mysterious dealings with the innermost secrets of Nature, and he had passed the “problem of the Fourth, Sixth and Seventh,” which according to his theories, meant certain refractions and comminglings of light. Now he had arrived at “the ultimate culmination of the Eighth,” or, as he described it “the close or the rebound of the Octave,”--and in this “rebound” or “culmination” his subject, Diana, was to take part as a mote within a sun-ray. She did not disguise from herself the danger in which she stood,--but she had thought out every argument for and against the ordeal which she had voluntarily accepted. She measured the value of her life from each standpoint and found it _nil_, except in so far as her love for natural beauty was concerned. She would be sorry, she said inwardly, to leave the trees, the flowers, the birds, the beautiful things of sky and sea, but she would not be sorry at all to see the last of human beings! With all her indifference, which even to her own consciousness, enshrined her as within barriers of ice, her memory was keen,--she looked back to the few months of distance and time which separated her from the old life of the dutiful daughter to inconsiderate and selfish parents--and beyond that, she went still further and saw herself as a young girl full of hope and joy, given up heart and soul to the illusion of love, from which she was torn by the rough hand of the very man to whom she had consecrated her every thought. In all this there was nothing enviable or regrettable that she should now be sorry or afraid to die--and in her life to come--if she lived--what would there be? Her eyes turned almost without her own consent towards the