with you up in that
little anteroom started. I've pretty well done it. As far as the music
itself is concerned, I think I have done it."

He paused there and pressed his lips together. Then he went on speaking,
stiffly, one word at a time. "And I was saying to myself when you knocked
that I would tear it up, every sheet of it, and set it alight in the
stove yonder if it would take me back to that hour we had together at
Hickory Hill."

The tenderness of her voice when she replied (it had some of the
characteristic qualities of his beloved woodwinds) did not preclude a
bead of humor, almost mischief, from gilding the salient points of
its modeling.

"I know," she said. "I can guess what that feeling must be; the perfect
emptiness and despair of having a great work done. I suspect there aren't
many great masterpieces that one couldn't have bought cheap by offering
the mess of pottage at the right moment. Oh, no, I didn't mean a sneer
when I said cheap. I really understand. That very next morning out in the
orchard, thinking over it, I managed to be glad you'd gone--alone. Your
own way, rather than back with me to Ravinia. But--I'm glad I came
to-night and I'm glad I know about--_The Dumb Princess_."

Watching her as her unfocused reminiscent gaze made it easy for him to
do, he saw her go suddenly pale, saw the perspiration bead out on her
forehead as if some thought her mind had found itself confronting
actually sickened her. He waited an instant, breathless in an agony of
doubt whether to notice or to go on pretending to ignore. After a moment
the wave passed.

"I know that was a figure of speech," she resumed,--her voice was
deadened a little in timbre but its inflections were as light as before.
"But I wish--I'd really be ever so much--happier--if you'd give me a
promise; a perfectly serious, solemn,"--she hesitated for a word and
smiled,--"death-bed promise, that you never will burn up _The Dumb
Princess_. At least until she's all published and produced. And I wish
that as soon as you've got a copy made, you'd put this manuscript in a
really safe place."

He turned away from her, baffled, bewildered. She had evaded the issue he
had tried to confront her with. She had taken the passionate declaration
of his wish to retrieve the great error of his life as a passing emotion
familiar to all creative artists at certain stages in their work. It was
a natural, almost inevitable, way of looking at it! He sat for a mome