Without the slightest movement she sat on and waited; and that was exceedingly characteristic of Diana. Where another girl would have felt embarrassed and made some sound to relieve the tension, she almost held her breath to retain it. The situation was unique. In a life that offered deplorably little of novelty and adventure she would not for worlds have thrown away such a chance. Meryl, on the other hand, would probably not have felt the tension; she would have quietly walked past him out at the entrance. Diana felt the atmosphere of the footlights and calmly waited.
And, of course, in the end, vaguely conscious of some disturbing, not quite accountable element, Carew looked up straight into her eyes.
Diana looked straight back and tried hard to keep her lips from twitching. She noticed pleasurably that he did not start; that he scarcely even showed surprise. Such a man, she felt, would not. Yet the very fact that for several seconds he remained perfectly still, staring at her, showed that he was quite satisfactorily astounded. Then he stood up, and waited a moment as if he expected her to speak. She thought he might have smiled. The hero on the stage, of course, would smile—divinely—and a blush like a tender dawn would overspread the heroine's rose-leaf cheeks.
But he did not smile; to be honest, he looked excessively annoyed, and no tender blush of any sort could possibly have shown upon her sunburnt face.
Still, she did not intend to flinch, and if the mischievous smile lurking at the corners of her mouth died away, she still regarded him with a calmness equal to his own, and with the impishness quite emphatically still in her eyes. Then suddenly she felt as if there had been some invisible sword-play between them. Her instinct told her he resented her silent watching, and that his cool, collected front now and his silence were the expression of his resentment. It was not in the least like a fairy story, of course; here was the prince, surly, stony, and bearish, and the princess, red and brown with sunburn, on the point of being caught at a disadvantage. But there Diana's native wits came to her aid, and she did a clever thing.
"Would you mind helping me down?" she asked, sweetly. "I climbed up here to get a good view of the interior, and when I try to descend the stones slip so, I am nervous. I did not like to disturb you before," she finished, unabashed and unblushing, but carefully lowering her eyes a moment.
He stepped forward at once and reached his hand up to her, and she saw that his keen eyes were of that intense clear blue seen in so many strong, notable men, but that they looked at her in a cold, aloof manner which made her feel rather small and childish. "Surely," she thought, "he is not genuinely angry just because I did not tell him I was there?" Aloud she said:
"Thank you," and placed her hand quite calmly in the strong, inviting brown one upheld to her.
Then, taken with a fit of devilry out of growing exasperation, she added, "I'm not the daughter, I'm the niece."
"Miss Pym, I presume," he said, coldly, and bowed to her.