“Sixty at least!” and he laughed with her. “The Baroness is a great deal older than you are, but she still subjugates the fancy of some men. Her idea of a doctor’s private secretary or assistant is a kind of Macbeth’s witch, too severely schooled in the virtues of ugliness to wear rose-coloured chiffon!” Diana flushed a little as he gave a meaning glance at her graceful draperies,--then he added: “Come out for a moment in the loggia,--moonlight is often talked about and written about, but it seldom gives such an impression of itself as on an early autumn night in Switzerland. Come!” She obeyed,--and as she followed him to the marble loggia where the fountains were still playing, an irresistible soft cry of rapture broke from her lips. The scene she looked upon was one of fairy-like enchantment,--the moonlight, pearly pure, was spread in long broad wings of white radiance over the lawns in front of the Château, and reaching out through the shadows of trees, touched into silver the misty, scarcely discernible peaks of snow-mountains far beyond. A deep silence reigned everywhere--that strange silence so frequently felt in the vicinity of mountains,--so that when the bell of the chiming clock set in the turret of the Château struck eleven, its sound was almost startling. “This would be a night for a sail on the lake,” said Dimitrius. “Some evening you must come.” She made no reply. Her soul was in her eyes--looking, looking wistfully at the beauty of the night, while all the old, unsatisfied hunger ached at her heart--the hunger for life at its best and brightest--for the things which were worth having and holding,--and absorbed in a sudden wave of thought she hardly remembered for the moment where she was. “Millions of people look at this moon to-night without seeing it,” said Dimitrius, after a pause, during which he had watched her attentively. “Millions of people live in the world without knowing anything about it. They,--_themselves_,--are to them, the universe. Like insects, they grub for food and bodily satisfaction,--like insects, they die without having ever known any higher aim of existence. Yet, looking on such loveliness as this to-night, do you not feel that something more lasting, more real than the usual mode of life _was_ and _is_ intended for us? Does it not seem a flaw in the Creator’s plan that this creation should be invested with such beauty and perfection for human beings who do not even see it? Do we make the utmost of our capabilities?” She turned her eyes away from the moonlit landscape and looked at him with rather a sad smile.