onspicuous in his
memory, no longer even faintly disturbing. As for Plashers Mead and the
webs of the moon, they were become the adventure of a pleasant dream. He
was in fact back in town.

Michael went quickly to the studio and found Stella not playing as he
hoped, but sitting listless. Then he realized how much at the very
moment the parlormaid told him of Stella's return he had feared such a
return was the prelude to disaster. Almost he had it on his lips to ask
abruptly what was the matter. It cost him an effort to greet her with
just that amount of fraternal cordiality which would not dishonor by its
demonstrativeness this studio of theirs. He was so unreasonably glad to
see her back from Vienna that a gesture of weakness on her side would
have made him kiss her.

"Hullo, I didn't expect to see you," was, however, all he said.

"Nor did I you," was what she answered.

Presently she began to give him an elaborate account of the journey from
Austria, and Michael knew that exactly in proportion to its true
insignificance was the care she bestowed upon its dreariness and dust.

Michael began to wish it were not exactly a quarter-of-an-hour before
lunch. Such a period was too essentially consecrated to orderly ideas
and London smoothness for it to admit the intrusion of anything more
disturbing than the sound of a gong. What could have brought Stella back
from Vienna?

"Did you come this morning?" he asked.

"Oh, no. Last night. Why?" she demanded. "Do I look as crumpled as all
that?"

For Stella to imply so directly that something had happened which she
had expected to change materially even her outward appearance was
perhaps a sign he would soon be granted her confidence. He rather wished
she would be quick with it. If he were left too long to form his own
explanations, he would be handicapped at the crucial moment. Useless
indeed he were imagining all this, he thought in supplement, as the
lunch-gong restored by its clamor the atmosphere of measured life where
nothing really happens.

After lunch Stella went up to her room: the effect of the journey, she
turned round to say, still called for sleep. Michael did not see her
again before dinner. She came down then, looking very much older than he
had ever seen her, whether because she was dressed in oyster-gray satin
or was in fact much older, Michael did not know. She grumbled at him for
not putting on a dinner jacket.

"Don't look so horrified at the noti