"I know I'm late, but I can a.s.sure you"--with a grim smile--"love had little enough to do with it."

Adrienne looked up sharply, struck by the bitter note in his voice.

"Then what had?" she asked. "What has gone wrong, Max? You look f.a.gged out."

"Baroni has been round to see me--to ask me to break off my engagement." He laughed shortly.

"He doesn't approve, I suppose?"

"That's a mild way of expressing his att.i.tude."

Adrienne was silent a moment. Then she spoke, slowly, consideringly.

"I don't--approve--either. It isn't right, Max."

He bit his lip.

"So you--you, too, are against me?"

She stretched out her hand impulsively.

"Not against you, Max! Never that! How could I be? . . . But I don't think you're being quite fair to Diana. You ought to tell her the truth."

He wheeled round.

"No one knows better than you how impossible that is."

"Don't you trust her then--the woman you're asking to be your wife?"

The tinge of irony in her voice brought a sudden light of anger to his eyes.

"That's not very just of you, Adrienne," he said coldly. "_I_ would trust her with my life. But I have no right to pledge the trust of others--and that's what I should be doing if I told her. We have our duty--you and I--and all this . . . is part of it."

Adrienne hesitated.

"Couldn't you--ask the others to release you?"

He shook his head.

"What right have I to ask them to trust an Englishwoman with their secret--just for my pleasure?"

"For your happiness," corrected Adrienne softly.

"Or for my happiness? My happiness doesn't count with them one straw."

"It does with me. I don't see why she shouldn't be told. Baroni knows, and Olga--you have to trust them."

"Baroni will be silent for the sake of the dead, and Olga out of her love--or fear"--with a bitter smile--"of me."

"And wouldn't Diana, too, be silent for your sake?"

"My dear Adrienne"--a little irritably--"Englishwomen are so frank--so indiscreetly trusting. That's where the difficulty lies, and I dare not risk it. There's too much at stake. But can you imagine any agent they may have put upon our track surprising her knowledge out of Olga?"

He laughed contemptuously. "I fancy not! If Olga hadn't been a woman she'd have made her mark in the Diplomatic Service."

"Yet what is there to make her keep faith with us?" said Adrienne doubtfully. "She is poor--"

"Her own doing, that!"

"True, but the fact remains. And those others would pay a fortune for the information she could give. Besides, I believe she frankly hates me."

"Possibly. But she would never, I think, allow her personal feelings to override everything else. After all, she was one of us--is still, really, though she would gladly disown the connection."

"Well, when you've looked at every side of the matter, we only come back to the same point. I think you're acting wrongly. You're letting Diana pledge herself blindly, when you're not free to give her the confidence a man should give his wife--when you don't even know--yet--how it may all end."

Almost Baroni's very words! Max winced.

"No. I don't know how it will end, as you say. But surely there _will_ come a time when I shall be free to live my own life?"

Adrienne smiled a trifle wistfully.

"If your conscience ever lets you," she said.

There was a long silence. Presently she resumed:---

"I never thought, when you first told me about your engagement, that the position of affairs need make any difference. I was so pleased to think that you cared for each other! And now--where will it all end?

How many lives are going to be darkened by the same shadow? Oh, it's terrible, Max, terrible!"

The tears filled her eyes.

"Don't!" said Max unsteadily. "Don't! I know it's bad enough.

Perhaps you're right--I oughtn't to have spoken to Diana, I hoped things would right themselves eventually, but you and Baroni have put another complexion upon matters. It's all an inextricable tangle, whichever way one looks at it--come good luck or bad! . . . I suppose I was wrong--I ought to have waited. But now . . . now . . . Before G.o.d, Adrienne! I can't, give her up--not now!"

CHAPTER XVII

"WHOM G.o.d HATH JOINED TOGETHER"

Max and Diana were married shortly before the following Christmas. The wedding took place very quietly at Crailing, only a few intimate friends being asked to it. For, as Max pointed out, either their invitations must be limited to a dozen or so, or else Diana must resign herself to a fashionable wedding in town, with all the world and his wife as guests at the subsequent reception. No middle course is possible when a well-known dramatist elects to marry the latest sensation in the musical world!

So it was in the tiny grey church overlooking the sea that Max and Diana were made one, with the distant murmur of the waves in their ears, and with Alan Stair to speak the solemn words that joined their lives together, and when the little intimate luncheon which followed the ceremony was over, they drove away in Max's car to the wild, beautiful coast of Cornwall, there to spend the first perfect days of their married life.

And they were perfect days! Afterwards, when clouds had dimmed the radiance of the sun, and doubts and ugly questionings were beating up on every side, Diana had always that radiant fortnight by the Cornish sea--she and Max alone together--to look back upon.

The woman whose married life holds sorrow, and who has no such golden memory stored away, is bereft indeed!

On their return to London, the Erringtons established themselves at Lilac Lodge, a charming old-fashioned house in Hampstead, where the creeper-clad walls and great bushes of lilac reminded Diana pleasantly of the old Rectory at Crailing. Jerry made one of the household--"resident secretary" as he proudly termed himself, and his cheery, good-humoured presence was invaluable whenever difficulties arose.