The Sheik | Page 8

intoxicating smells of the night that had first driven her, as a

very small child, to clamber down from her balcony, clinging to the
thick ivy roots, to wander with the delightful sense of wrong-doing
through the moonlit park and even into the adjoining gloomy woods.
She had always been utterly fearless.
Her childhood had been a strange one. There had been no near relatives
to interest themselves in the motherless girl left to the tender mercies of
a brother nearly twenty years her senior, who was frankly and
undisguisedly horrified at the charge that had been thrust upon him.
Wrapped up in himself, and free to indulge in the wander hunger that
gripped him, the baby sister was an intolerable burden, and he had
shifted responsibility in the easiest way possible. For the first few years
of her life she was left undisturbed to nurses and servants who spoiled
her indiscriminately. Then, when she was still quite a tiny child, Sir
Aubrey Mayo came home from a long tour, and, settling down for a
couple of years, fixed on his sister's future training, modelled rigidly on
his own upbringing. Dressed as a boy, treated as a boy, she learned to
ride and to shoot and to fish--not as amusements, but seriously, to
enable her to take her place later on as a companion to the man whose
only interests they were. His air of weariness was a mannerism. In
reality he was as hard as nails, and it was his intention that Diana
should grow up as hard. With that end in view her upbringing had been
Spartan, no allowances were made for sex or temperament and nothing
was spared to gain the desired result. And from the first Diana had
responded gallantly, throwing herself heart and soul into the arduous,
strenuous life mapped out for her. The only drawback to a perfect
enjoyment of life were the necessary lessons that had to be gone
through, though even these might have been worse. Every morning she
rode across the park to the rectory for a couple of hours' tuition with the
rector, whose heart was more in his stable than in his parish, and whose
reputation was greater across country than it was in the pulpit. His
methods were rough and ready, but she had brains, and acquired an
astonishing amount of diverse knowledge. But her education was
stopped with abrupt suddenness when she was fifteen by the arrival at
the rectory of an overgrown young cub who had been sent by a
despairing parent, as a last resource, to the muscular rector, and who
quickly discovered what those amongst whom she had grown up had

hardly realised, that Diana Mayo, with the clothes and manners of a
boy, was really an uncommonly beautiful young woman. With the
assurance belonging to his type, he had taken the earliest opportunity of
telling her so, following it with an attempt to secure the kiss that up to
now his own good looks had always secured for him. But in this case
he had to deal with a girl who was a girl by accident of birth only, who
was quicker with her hands and far finer trained than he was, and
whose natural strength was increased by furious rage. She had blacked
his eyes before he properly understood what was happening, and was
dancing around him like an infuriated young gamecock when the rector
had burst in upon them, attracted by the noise.
What she left he had finished, and then, breathless and angry, had
ridden back across the park with her and had briefly announced to Sir
Aubrey, who happened to be at home upon one of his rare visits, that
his pupil was both too old and too pretty to continue her studies at the
rectory, and had taken himself off as hurriedly as he had come, leaving
Sir Aubrey to settle for himself the new problem of Diana. And, as
before, it was settled in the easiest possible way. Physically she was
perfectly able to take up the role for which he had always intended her;
mentally he presumed that she knew as much as it was necessary for
her to know, and, in any case, travelling itself was an education, and a
far finer one than could be learned from books. So Diana grew up in a
day, and in a fortnight the old life was behind her and she had started
out on the ceaseless travels with her brother that had continued for the
last six years--years of perpetual change, of excitements and dangers.
She thought of it all, sitting on the broad rail of the balcony, her head
slanted against the column on which she leaned. "It's been a splendid
life," she murmured, "and to-morrow--to-day begins the