ly certain persons who say the thing
may sometime be produced that way. Who knows? Too sensitive!--but if
he hadn't been we shouldn't have had the music. These poor chaps,
always balanced between joy and sorrow by a hair!" And he ground out
between his teeth, "One of those Beatrices of ours. As if she had come
to a harp, and had made all its strings vibrate just for the pleasure
of hearing their quality, and then had gone on content----"

Lilla rose, drew her cloak around her, and departed with an appalling
sensation of pity and resentment.

CHAPTER XIX

One afternoon, returning to her house on lower Fifth Avenue, as she
entered the hall paved with black and white tiles she saw a shabby
little man trying to rise from a settee between two consoles, by aid of
a pair of crutches. For an instant she had a hazy idea that he ought
to be holding a breakfast tray in his hands. Then, with a sickening
leap of her heart, she realized that this was Parr, who had been
Lawrence Teck's valet.

He had thought she would want to receive from him, promptly on his
return, a first-hand report on that African tragedy.

"But where have you been all this time?"

He had been a long while recovering from the wound that had crippled
him, and from the black-water fever. Then he had found himself
penniless, dependent on the charity of traders and petty government
officials in the port town lying just above the equator. He had
"drifted about," a reproach, perhaps, to a certain human callousness
engendered by the tropics, till finally an old friend of Lawrence
Teck's had appeared from Mozambique, found him sitting in tatters on
the steps of a grogshop, and paid his passage home.

"You should have let me know," she said remorsefully.

He hung his head.

She led him into the drawing-room, and seated him in one of the
mulberry chairs. He had become an old man. His honest, lantern-jawed
face was gray and drawn.

And then there had always been the idea in his head that he ought to
have fallen with his master.

"I couldn't help myself, ma'am," he said in a broken voice. "Before I
hardly knew what was up he was done for, and I had this spear wound in
me, and our gun boys was dragging me off amongst them, shooting to
right and left. I didn't rightly know what was going on any more than
if I'd got mauled by a pack of lions. Once when I kind of come to
myself I tried to make them go back; but they told me they'd seen the
Mamb