She found the sitting-room dark and empty. No dinner had been prepared; for on lucky days the Captain and his protégé were wont to dine at the table d'hôte of one of the hotels, or to feast sumptuously à la carte, while on unlucky days they did not dine at all. Diana found a roll and some cream cheese in a roomy old cupboard that was flavoured with mice; and after making a very indifferent meal in the dusky chamber, she went out upon the balcony, and sat there looking down upon the lighted town.
She had been sitting there for nearly an hour in the same attitude, when the door of the sitting-room was opened, and a footstep sounded behind her. She knew the step; and although she did not lift her head, her eyes took a new brightness in the summer dusk, and the listless grace of her attitude changed to a statuesque rigidity, though there was no change in the attitude itself.
She did not stir till a hand was laid softly on her shoulder, and a voice said,—"Diana!"
The speaker was Valentine Hawkehurst, the young man whose entrance to the golden temple had been so closely watched by Captain Paget's daughter.
She rose as he spoke, and turned to him. "You have been losing, I suppose, Mr. Hawkehurst," she said, "or you would not have come home?"
"I am compelled to admit that you are right in your premise, Miss Paget, and your deduction is scarcely worth discussion. I have been losing—confoundedly; and as they don't give credit at the board of green cloth yonder, there was no excuse for my staying. Your father has not been holding his own within the last hour or two; but when I left the rooms he was going to the Hotel d'Orange with some French fellows for a quiet game of écarté. Our friend the Captain is a great card, Miss Paget, and has a delightful talent for picking up distinguished acquaintance."
There are few daughters who would have cared to hear a father spoken of in this free-and-easy manner; but Diana Paget was quite unmoved. She had resumed her old attitude, and sat looking towards the lighted windows of the Kursaal, while Mr. Hawkehurst lounged against the angle of the window with his hands in his pockets and a cigar in his mouth.
For three years Valentine Hawkehurst had lived in constant companionship with the Captain's daughter; and in that time his manner to her had undergone considerable variation. Of late it had been something in the manner of an elder brother, whose fraternal breast is impervious to the influence of a sister's loveliness or a sister's fascination. If Diana Paget had been a snub-nosed young person with red hair and white eyelashes, Mr. Hawkehurst could scarcely have treated her with a more friendly indifference, a more brotherly familiarity.
Unhappily this line of conduct, which is perhaps the wisest and most honourable plan that a man can pursue when he finds himself thrown into a dangerously familiar association with a beautiful and unprotected woman, is the very line of proceeding which a beautiful woman can never bring herself to forgive. A chivalrous stiffness, a melancholy dignity, a frozen frigidity, which suggest the fiery bubbling of the lava flood beneath the icy surface,—these are delightful to the female mind. But friendly indifference and fraternal cordiality constitute the worst insult that can be offered to her beauty, the most bitter outrage upon the majesty of her sex.
"I suppose it will be midnight before papa comes home, Mr. Hawkehurst," Diana said abruptly, when her companion had finished his cigar, and had thrown the end of it over the balcony.