The Splendid Folly Part 56

"Dear," she said, and her voice broke softly. "Take me with you. Oh, but you must think me very slow and stupid not to have learned--yet--what love means! . . . Ah, Max! Max! What am I to do, dear, if you won't let me go with you? What shall I do with all the love that is in my heart--if you won't take it?" For a moment she stood there tremulously smiling, while he stared at her, in his eyes a kind of bewilderment and unbelief fighting the dawn of an unutterable joy.

Then at last he understood, and his arms went round her.

"If I won't take it!" he cried, his voice all shaken with the wonder of it. "Oh, my sweet! I'll take it as a beggar takes a gift, as a blind man sight--on my knees, thanking G.o.d for it--and for you."

And so Diana came again into her kingdom, whence she had wandered outcast so many bitter months.

Presently she drew him down beside her on to a big, cus.h.i.+oned divan.

"Max, what a lot of time we've wasted!"

"So much, sweet, that all the rest of life we'll be making up for it."

And he kissed her on the mouth by way of a beginning.

"What will Baroni say?" she whispered, with a covert smile.

"He'll wish he was young, as we are, so that he could love--as we do," he replied triumphantly.

Diana laughed at him for an arrogant lover, then sighed at a memory she knew of.

"I think he _has_ loved--as we do," she chided gently.

Max's arm tightened round her.

"Then he's in need of envy, beloved, for love like ours is the most wonderful thing life has to give."

They were silent a moment, and then the quick instinct of lovers told them they were no longer alone.

Baroni stood on the threshold of the room, frowning heavily.

"So!" he exclaimed, grimly addressing Max. "This, then, is how you travel in haste to Paris?"

Startled, Diana sprang to her feet, and would have drawn herself away, but Max laughed joyously, and still keeping her hand in his, led her towards Baroni.

"_We_ travel to Paris to-morrow," he said. "Won't you--wish us luck, Baroni?"

But luck was the last thing which the old _maestro_ was by way of wis.h.i.+ng them. For long he argued and expostulated upon the madness, as he termed it, of Diana's renouncing her career, trying his utmost to dissuade her.

"You haf not counted the cost!" he fumed at her. "You cannot haf counted the cost!"

But Diana only smiled at him.

"Yes, I have. And I'm glad it's going to cost me something--a good deal, in fact--to go back to Max. Don't you see, _Maestro_, it kind of squares things the tiniest bit?" She paused, adding, after a moment: "And it's such a little price to pay--for love."

Baroni, who, after all, knew a good deal about love as well as music, regarded her a moment in silence. Then, with a characteristic shrug of his ma.s.sive shoulders, he yielded.

"So, then, the most marvellous voice of the century is to be wasted reading aloud to a Grand d.u.c.h.ess! Ah! Dearest of all my pupils, there is no folly in all the world at once so foolish and so splendid as the folly of love."