“Silence is so wonderful.” He turned his languishing eyes upon her. “Silence and thought and The Woman.”
But Diana had her piece to say, carefully prepared and rehearsed in the solitude of her room.
“Five years ago you were good enough to ask me to marry you. I refused. People say that young girls are brainless—the fact that I declined the honour you offered is proof to the contrary. What I felt then, I feel now. My heart is in the grave!”
“My grave.” His smile was melancholy but complacent.
“Don’t be silly. You are alive, I’m sorry—I mean I should be sorry if you weren’t. I had a lover—my heart went out to him, Wopsy,”—her voice trembled, she thought there were tears in his sympathetic eyes, “but he passed.”
“Ran away from you?” Mr. Dempsi sat up.
“When I say ‘passed’”—there was more than a trace of acid in Diana’s voice—“I mean ... to the Great Beyond.”
“Pegged out?” Dempsi shrugged. “These things happen. Once I loved a girl—oh, Diana, such a girl amongst girls! Tall, divinely fair, gracious in every look and movement. She also passed—to the Great Beyond.”
“She died?” whispered Diana.
“She went on to the stage—in America,” said Dempsi. “She was dead to me. I cut her out of my heart. I could have killed myself, but I said: ‘Wopsy, have you forgotten your little Diana—your first, your only love?’ With a courage that I have often admired, I forgot her. She is now the greatest screen vamp in Hollywood. I see her frequently without a tremor. Such things happen.”