“Very much so!” and Diana smiled. “But that doesn’t prevent his making love to me--and I let him do it! You see, _he’s_ no relation!--and I don’t consider his fat wife any more than he considered me when he married _her_ and threw _me_ over! But he’s like you--he doesn’t believe I’m the old Diana!” “Of course not!” and Mr. May expanded his chest with a long breath of superior wisdom. “I should like to see him and talk to him about you and your sad condition of mind----” “No doubt you would, but you won’t,” said Diana calmly. “I have forbidden him to go near you for the present. He dare not ask any questions about me--till--till I have done with him!” What a look there was in her eyes! James Polydore shrank under it as though it blinded him. “Dare not? Done with him?” he echoed stupidly. She laughed, quite sweetly. “There, poor Pa, do go home! Pay your attentions to my mother’s companion, Miss Preston--if she really likes your endearments, why, then, ‘crabbed age and youth’ _may_ live together! Poor mother! She never found out _all_ your little ways!--some of them she discovered by chance--but _I_ knew them all! What would you give to be as young as I am at your age! ‘Too late, too late!--ye cannot enter now!’” Her laughter rang out again,--then approaching him, she laid her hands lightly on his shoulders and kissed him. “There, that’s a true daughter’s kiss!--make the best of it, dear Pa! Go home and be a good, nice, moral old man!--sit on one side of the fireplace with Ma on the other, and settle down into Darby and Joan!--such a nice couple!--with a dash of Miss Preston between to keep up your spirits! And don’t come back here _ever_!--unless you accept the true position we occupy of father and daughter--father growing old, and daughter growing young!” Standing in the centre of the room, with the soft ivory chiffon and lace of her “rest gown” trailing about her like the delicate _cirri_ floating across a summer sky, she appeared like a vision of something altogether beyond mere woman, and as the little gross, sensual man who _had been_ her father looked at her, a sudden unnameable terror overcame him. His limbs shook--his brain reeled,--within himself a frightened sense of something supernatural paralysed his will--and he made for the door like a man groping in the dark. She threw it open for him with a queenly gesture of dismissal. “Tell my mother,” she said, “that her daughter is truly alive, and that she has kissed you!--not as the ‘old’ but as the young Diana! Don’t forget!” CHAPTER XXV