Olga replied with a grim incisiveness.
"You're killing Max—that's all. This—this is going to break him—break him utterly."
There was a long silence, and the dewy dusk of the night, shaken into pearly mist where the flickering light of the Chinese lanterns illumined it, seemed to close round the two women, like a filmy curtain, shutting them off from the chattering throng in the adjoining room.
Presently a cart rattled past in the street below, rasping the tense silence.
Diana lifted her head.
"I didn't know!" she said helplessly. "I didn't know! . . ."
"And yet you professed to love him!" Olga spoke consideringly, an element of contemptuous wonder in her voice.
The memory of words that Max had uttered long ago stirred in Diana's mind.
"You don't know what love means!"
Limned against the darkness she could see once more the sun-warmed beach at Culver Point, the blue, sparkling sea with the white gulls wheeling above it, and Max—Max standing tall and straight beside her, with a shaft of sunlight flickering across his hair, and love illimitable in his eyes.