provoke in her any renewal of
self-consciousness; so he enjoyed the fiery composition and Stella's
calm with only a faint regret that he would never know its name and
would never be able to ask her to play it again. When she had finished,
she swung round on the stool and asked him what had happened to Lily
Haden.

"I don't know--really--they've left Trelawny Road," he said, feeling
vaguely an unfair flank attack was being delivered.

"And you never think of her, I suppose?" demanded Stella.

"Well, no, I don't very much."

"Yet I can remember," said Stella, "when you were absolutely miserable
because she had been flirting with somebody else."

"Yes, I was very miserable," Michael admitted. "And you were rather
contemptuous about it, I remember. You told me I ought to be more
proud."

"And don't you realize," Stella said, "that just because I did remember
what I told you, I made my effort and began to play the piano again?"

Michael waited. He supposed that she would now take him into her
confidence, but she swung round to the keyboard, and when she had
finished playing she had become herself again, detached and cool and
masterful. It was incredible that the wet ball of a handkerchief half
hidden by a cushion could be her handkerchief.

Michael made up his mind that Stella's unhappiness was due to a
love-affair which had been wrecked either by circumstance or
temperament, and he tried to persuade himself of his indignation against
the unknown man. He was sensible of a desire to punch the fellow's
head. With the easy exaggerations of the night-time he could picture
himself fighting duels with punctilious Austrian noblemen. He went so
far as mentally to indite a letter to Alan and Lonsdale requesting their
secondary assistance. Then the memory of Lily began to dance before him.
He forgot about Stella in speculations about Lily. Time had softened the
trivial and shallow infidelity of which she had been guilty. Time with
night for ally gave her slim form an ethereal charm. He had been reading
this week of the great imaginative loves of the Middle Ages, and of that
supple and golden-haired girl he began to weave an abstraction of
passion like the Princess of Trebizond. He slept upon the evocation of
her beauty just as he was setting forth upon a delicate and intangible
pursuit. Next morning Michael suggested to Stella they should revisit
Carlington Road.

"My god, to think we once lived here!" exclaimed Stella, as