It now seemed to Diana that the happenings of that whole day had been moving toward that culminating moment, when David's deep tender voice should call her his wife; yet he had not done so, until only a narrow shifting plank, on which her feet already stood, lay between them, and a last earthly farewell.
Diana had sped down the gangway; and when her feet touched the wharf she had fled to her car, without looking back; knowing that if she looked back, and saw David's earnest eyes watching her from the top, his boyish figure standing, slim and erect—she would have turned and rushed back up the gangway, caught his hand to her breast, and asked him to say those words again. And, if David had called her his wife again—in that tone which made all things sway and reel around her, and fortune, home, friends, position seem as nothing to the fact that she was that to him—she could never have let go his hand again. They must have remained forever on the same side of the gangway; either she sailing with David to Central Africa, or David returning with her to Riverscourt.
Yet she did not want to go to Africa; and she certainly did not want David at Riverscourt! Her whole plan of life was to reign supreme in her own possessions, mistress of her home, mistress of her time, and, most important of all, mistress of herself.
Then what was the meaning of this strange disturbance in the hitherto unruffled calm of her inner being? What angel had come down, on lightning wing, to trouble the still waters of her deepest self?
Diana was confronted by that most illusive of psychological problems, the solving of the mystery of a woman's heart—and she possessed no key thereto. Her knowledge of the world, her advanced ideas, her indiscriminate reading, had not supplied her with the golden key, which lies in the fact of the utter surrender of a noble woman, to the mighty love, and the infinite need, of a strong, good, man.
She had chosen to go home alone. She had preferred this parting of the ways. Then why was it so desperately sweet to recall David's voice saying: "Good-bye, my wife"? Why did nothing still this strange aching at her breast, save the remembrance of the touch of his hand, as she had pressed it against her?
She would have stopped the motor and bidden her man race back to the wharf, on the chance of having a last sight of David, standing on the deck of the liner, had he not bidden her go at once, without delay; so that, in thus going, she was rendering him the one act of obedience possible, in their brief wedded life.