gs melted
also. She began to float toward him, over the floor that she no longer
felt beneath her feet, so that her disembodied spirit might be merged
with this other spirit. Her half-raised hands prepared to cling to
him--as though one phantom could cling fast to another! But abruptly
an invisible force seemed to check her progress mid-way; and she stood
before him with her arms, that had meant to embrace him, lifted in what
appeared to be a gesture of horrified denial.

There was no change in his face disfigured by unhappiness and illness.

The air round them began to tremble with strains of music--harmonies
mounting up toward a climax of intolerable beauty. It came, this
perfect epitome of love, from behind the closed doors of the study,
where David Verne was playing as never before.

"Lilla!"

A profound silence followed the call that neither of these two had
uttered. And from behind the closed doors, David, transported by his
exultation, cried out again to the Muse:

"Lilla! Lilla!"

Swaying aside, she sank down into a chair. "Oh," she breathed, looking
at the rug as though some very precious object had slipped from her
hands and broken at her feet. As she sat there, a huddle of
coffee-colored fabric and pallid flesh, the sunlight burst through the
clouds to smite her all over with its glory, igniting her hair, turning
her face into incandescent gold.

Lawrence Teck watched this transformation.

He became natural--ready to fight for this woman, though still
believing that he despised everything about her except her loveliness.
All at once he was like a man who stands on the edge of a chasm, who
has an idea that he may be able to leap across, from a bitterness
endured alone to a bitterness shared with another. He took the leap.
He put her to the test.

She saw him walking across the living room toward the closed doors of
the study.

Noiselessly, as swift as her dreadful thought, she rose, traversed the
room, passed him, and whirled round against the door. She flung out
her arms in a movement that nailed her against the panels as to a
cross. She could not speak; but he read on her lips, as if she had
cried it in his face:

"No!"

The music began again, at first soft and simply melodious, soon complex
and thunderous. The door at her back vibrated from the sound, and the
quivering penetrated her body and her brain. She was filled with a new
horror, at the new, miraculous strength evinced i