listened, we--we were the same person. I can't
make you understand that. It never happened to me before, nothing in the
least like it, nothing so--intimate. I felt that song go vibrating right
through her. She didn't speak at all, even after it was over, except to
say that we mustn't talk--while we were waiting for the people in the
other room to go away. And then Mrs. Wollaston came and got me. She
didn't see her at all. She had disappeared somehow by that time."

He stopped but Jennie, it seemed, had nothing to say just then. She
turned away to her outdoor wrap but she laid it down again and stood
still when he went on.

"You don't want to run away with the idea that I'm in love with her," he
said. "That isn't it. That's particularly--not it. I haven't an idea who
she is nor any intention of trying to find out. Even if I knew the way to
begin getting acquainted with her, I'm inclined to think I'd avoid it.
But as an abstraction--no, that's not what I mean--as a symbol of what
I'll find waiting for me whenever I get down to the core of things ...
I've got a sort of--superstition if I don't do anything to--to break the
spell, you know, that sometime she'll come back just the way she came
that night."

With a little exaggeration of the significance of the act, she put on the
coat she had crossed the room to get. He got up and came over to help her
but he stopped with a sudden clenching of the hands, and a wave of color
in his face as he saw the look in hers. At that she came swiftly to meet
him, pulled him up in a tight embrace and kissed him.

"Good luck, my dear," she said. "I must be running and so must you. I'd
take you with me only we go different ways. Carry your score along to the
Wollastons. That's the first step to the princess, I guess."

CHAPTER IX

IN HARNESS

The episode upon which March had built the opera he called _The Outcry_,
was one that was current during the autumn of 1914. A certain Belgian
town had been burnt and it had been officially explained that this was
done because the German officer who was billeted upon the burgomaster had
been shot. The story was that the burgomaster's son shot him because he
had raped his sister. The thing got complete possession of March's mind.
At first just the horror of it and later its dramatic and musical
possibilities. He saw, in orchestral terms, the sodden revelry in that
staid house--with its endless cellars of Burgundy. He saw the tight-drawn