"Who is she?" Sara asked of Bobbie, who was next to her.
"A friend of Diana's. She has been looking after her sick mother for a year. Then Mrs. Dolce died, and Diana asked the girl here. She's a beauty, isn't she?"
"Yes," said Sara, who, in certain shimmering greens and blues, looked like a shining little peacock, an effect which was further emphasized by a slender feather caught by an emerald which she wore in her black hair. "Where did she live before she came to Diana?"
"The Lane mansion." Sara's tone was scornful. "But it's an awful old place----"
"I fancy they didn't have much money. But she doesn't need it, not with that face."
"Doris had better look out," said Sara, unpleasantly.
"Doris?" Bobbie's round young face grew red. "Doris is the last one, Sara, and there won't be any other. You and Justin can just let that subject alone."
Sara shrugged her shoulders, and returned to her survey of Bettina. "I wonder where she got that stunning gown, if she's so poor. It's straight from Paris."
"Oh, you women," Bobbie exploded, and rested his eyes on Doris, across the table, and the thought of her gentleness was like soothing balm in contrast to Sara's sharpness.
After dinner Diana sang. She sat at the piano, which was placed just within the door of the unlighted music room, and her guests grouped themselves on the porch outside.
She gave them, first, a little German serenade, then a gay bit of Paris music-hall frivolity, and finally her fingers strayed into the accompaniment of a song which she had written for Anthony. It was called "The Wind From the Sea," and it had a haunting refrain.
Diana's thrilling voice rose and fell with the beating cadences. She had sung the song for Anthony on the night before she sailed for Berlin, and when she had finished he had made once more his insistent plea, and she had said, "Wait."
Bettina, next to Anthony, in a corner of the porch, had had a rapturous moment when he had murmured, "How lovely you are to-night," and had laid his hand over hers in the darkness.
But as Diana sang, her joy was suddenly shadowed. Why was Diana singing things that seemed to drag the heart out of one, and why had Anthony taken his hand away, and why was he so still?