“True!” she said. “She was too gentle by half! She was meek and patient--devoted, submissive and loving--she believed in a man’s truth, honour and chivalry! Yes--the poor ‘old’ Diana had feeling and emotions--but the ‘young’ Diana has none!” The afternoon sunshine pouring through the window bathed her figure in a luminance so dazzling and made of her such a radiant vision of exquisite perfection that he was fairly dazzled, while the same uneasy sense of the “supernatural” troubled him as it had troubled Mr. James Polydore May. “Well, if you _will_ talk like this,” he said, almost reproachfully--“I had better not trouble you with my company--you said you wanted me----” “So I do!” she rejoined--“I want you very much!--but not just now! You can go--but come again soon! However I need not ask you--you are sure to come! And you need not tell your wife to call upon me--I will dispense with that formality! I prefer to ignore your ‘family!’ _Au revoir!_” She stretched out her hand--a little, lovely hand like that of the marble Psyche--and hardly knowing what he did, he covered it with kisses. She smiled. “There, that will do!” she said--“Another time----” She gave him a look that shot like lightning from her eyes into his brain, and set it in a whirl. “Diana!” He uttered the name as if it were a prayer. “Another time!” she said, in a low, sweet tone--“And--quite soon! But--go now!” He left her reluctantly, his mind disquieted and terrorised. Some potent force appeared to have laid hold of his entire being, drawing every nerve and muscle as if by a strong current of electricity. In a dim sort of way he was afraid,--but of what? This he could not formulate to himself, but when he had gone out of her presence he was aware of a strange and paralysing weakness and tiredness,--sensations new to him, and--as he was a great coward where any sort of illness was concerned--alarming. And yet--such was the hold her beauty had on him, that he had made up his mind to possess it or die in the attempt. All the men he knew about town were infatuated with the mere glimpse of the loveliness which flashed upon them like the embodiment of light from another and fairer world, and there was not one among them who did not secretly indulge in the same hope as himself. But the craze or “obsession,” or whatever it was that dominated her, as he thought, gave him a certain advantage over her other admirers. For if she really believed he had formerly been her lover, then surely there was something in her which would draw her to him through the mere fancy of such a possibility. Like all men who are largely endowed with complacent self-satisfaction, he was encased in a hide of conceit too thick to imagine that with the “obsession” (as he considered it) which she entertained, might also go the memory of his callous treatment of her in the past, entailing upon him a possible though indefinable danger.