“Well!” he rejoined--then forced a difficult smile--“I wrote these things, certainly, but how you came by them I don’t know. Though, after all, you might easily have met the other Diana May, and she might have given you her confidence----” “And her lover’s letters to keep?” said Diana, contemptuously. “So like her! Reginald Cleeve, you said just now that I was playing--playing with you and with myself. Believe me, I never was further from ‘play’ in my life! I’m in deadly earnest! I want----” She paused and laughed--then added: “I only want what I can have for the asking--_you_!” He sprang up from his chair and came nearer to her, his face aglow with ardour. She motioned him back. “Not yet!” she said,--and the seductive beauty of her face and form smote him as with a whip of steel--“It isn’t love at first sight, you know, like that of Romeo and Juliet! We are _old_ lovers! And _you_--you are married.” “What does that matter?” he said, defiantly. “No man considers himself bound nowadays by the matrimonial tie!” “No?” she queried, sweetly. “I’m so glad to know that! It makes me doubly thankful that I never married you!” He made a closer step to her side and caught both her hands in his. “Do you still persist,” he said, “in your idea that you are the old Diana?--the woman I was engaged to?--you, a mere girl?” She smiled most entrancingly up into the feverish eyes that searched her face. “I still persist!” she answered--“I have always loved telling the truth, no matter how unpleasant! I _am_ the ‘old’ Diana to whom you were engaged, and whom you heartlessly ‘threw over.’ Her, and no other!--as ‘old’ as ever in years though not in looks!” His grasp of her tightened. “Then in Heaven’s name have your own way, you beautiful crazed creature!” he said, passionately,--“If that is your obsession or fancy, stick to it, and come back to me!” She loosened her hands,--he tried to hold them, but they seemed to melt from his clasp in the most curious and uncanny way like melting snow. Drawing herself apart, she stood looking at him. “Come back to you!” she echoed--“I never left you! It was you who left _me_!--for no fault! And, now I suppose you would leave your wife,--also for no fault--except perhaps--” and she laughed lightly--“that of too much general weightiness! But she has given you children--are you not proud and happy to be ‘the father of a family’? Your daughters are certainly very plain,--but you must not go by outward appearances!” Her lovely face dimpled with smiles--her brilliant eyes, full of a compelling magnetism, filled him with a kind of inward rage--he gave a gesture of mingled wrath and pain. “You are quite unlike the old Diana,” he said, bitterly. “She was the gentlest of creatures,--she would never have mocked me!” A rippling peal of laughter broke from her--laughter that was so cold and cutting that its very vibration on the air was like the tinkling of ice-drops on glass.