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“He’s fainted!” Diana cried—“get some water quick.”

“You devil!” screamed Elaine, her face distorted. “Look what’s happened! What right have you to do this? What right? What right?”

“What right?” Diana turned to her with black, shining eyes. “Every right in the world. I’ve been married to Charley Abbot for five years.”

Charley and Diana were married again in Greenwich early in June. After the wedding her oldest friends stopped calling her Diamond Dick—it had been a most inappropriate name for some years, they said, and it was thought that the effect on her children might be unsettling, if not distinctly pernicious.

Yet perhaps if the occasion should arise Diamond Dick would come to life again from the colored cover and, with spurs shining and buckskin fringes fluttering in the breeze, ride into the lawless hills to protect her own. For under all her softness Diamond Dick was always hard as steel—so hard that the years knew it and stood still for her and the clouds rolled apart and a sick man, hearing those untiring hoof-beats in the night, rose up and shook off the dark burden of the war.