ddenly confronted by all that in bodily form--by a Beatrice
in a sable coat from Fifth Avenue and a little black hat from Paris."

But in her silvery voice there was a cadence of irony, when she
demanded:

"Whom shall I inspire? Show me the one by whose aid I can pretend that
the woman is responsible for the masterpieces, as no doubt Vittoria
Colonna sometimes pretended to herself in the case of Michael Angelo.
But remember that it must be an affair like that one, romantically
platonic--_a la maniere de Provence_."

Brantome nodded benignantly. But old pangs had revived in his heart.

How well he understood this restlessness of hers, this sense of
impotency, this secret rancor at contemplation of congenial forms of
success! He, by some minute fault, some tiny slip of fate, had long
ago been doomed to these same sensations. In the morning of youth,
when gazing toward the future, he had seen the world at his feet,
unaware of that little flaw in the foundations of his Castle in Spain,
unwarned of the trick that destiny was going to play on him. All these
years it had been here in the bottom of his heart, the sensation of
inferiority, the gnawing chagrin. He had masked it well: one discerned
it only in some rare look when he was off his guard. And now and then,
for a while, he even vanquished it, when some fresh voice rose in the
world of music, and he championed the cause of that new genius so
generously, hotly, and triumphantly that the consequent renown seemed
nearly to be his own, since he had helped by his enthusiasm to
establish it.

"Yes, certainly, _a la maniere de Provence_--since music is so very
impersonal an art," he muttered, with an absentminded, haggard smile.

But Lilla was watching a man and woman who sat in a shadowy alcove, and
who, as some one began to play a nocturne, let their fingers twine
together.

CHAPTER XVIII

One night, at the end of the winter, she astonished everybody by
appearing with Fanny Brassfield in a box at the opera, wearing a black
velvet dress that made her, in that great horseshoe blooming with
flowerlike gowns, the objective of all eyes.

"There is hope!" said one young man waggishly to another. "Cornie
Rysbroek ought to see this."

But Cornelius Rysbroek was traveling far away.

As for Lawrence, he was slipping farther and farther into the past.
There were times when without the aid of his picture Lilla could no
longer visualize his face. Their moment