Once established in her flat with her chaperone, Mrs. Beresford, she lived the most curiously removed life from all the humanity that surged and seethed around her. The few appearances she made at operas, theatres, restaurants and the like were sufficient to lift her into the sphere of the recognised and triumphant “beauty” of the day. Coarse and vulgar seemed all the “faked” portraits of the half-nude sirens of stage and music-hall in the pictorial press, compared with the rare glimpses of the ethereal, almost divine loveliness which was never permitted to be copied by any painter or photographer. Once only did an eager camera-man press the button of his “snapshot” machine face to face with Diana as she came out of a flower-show,--she smiled kindly as she passed him and he thought himself in heaven. But when he came to develop his negative it was “fogged,” as though it had had the light in front of it instead of behind it, as photography demands. This accident was a complete mystification, as he had been more than usually careful to take up a correct position. However, other photographers were just as unfortunate, and none were able to obtain so much as a faint impression of the fair features which dazzled every male beholder who gazed upon them. Artists, even the most renowned R.A.’s, were equally disappointed,--she, the unapproachable, the cold, yet enchanting “maiden goddess moulded from a dream” would not “sit” to any one of them,--would not have anything to do with them at all, in fact--and fled from them as though she were a Daphne pursued by many Apollos. A very short time sufficed to surround her with a crowd of adorers and would-be lovers, chief and most persistent among them being Captain the Honourable Reginald Cleeve, and--that antique Adonis, her father, James Polydore May. The worthy James had all his life been in the habit of forming opinions which were diametrically opposed to the opinions of everyone else,--and pursuing this course always to his own satisfaction, he had come to the conclusion that this “Diana May” who declared herself to be his daughter, was an artful _demi-mondaine_ and adventuress with a “craze.” He had frequently heard of people who imagined themselves to be the reincarnated embodiments of the dead. “Why, God bless my soul, I should think so!” he said to a man at the Club who rallied him about his openly expressed admiration for the “new beauty” who bore the same name as that of his “drowned” daughter--“I met a woman once who told me she was the reincarnation of Cleopatra! Now this girl, just because she happens to have my name, sticks to her idea, that she is _my_ Diana----” “You’d like her to be, wouldn’t you?” chuckled his friend. “But if she takes you for her father----” “She does--poor child, she does!” and James Polydore May sighed. “You would hardly believe it----” “Why not?”--and the friend chuckled again--“You’re quite old enough!”