rson in the
room before! Shall I introduce you?'

'Delighted, of course. But don't disturb yourself about me, Miss
Leyburn. I come out of my hole so seldom, everything amuses me--but
especially looking and listening.'

'Which means,' she said, with frank audacity, 'that you dislike new
people!'

His eye kindled at once. 'Say rather that it means a preference for the
people that are not new! There is such a thing as concentrating one's
attention. I came to hear you play, Miss Leyburn!'

'Well?'

She glanced at him from under her long lashes, one hand playing with the
rings on the other. He thought, suddenly, with a sting of regret, of the
confiding child who had flushed under his praise that Sunday evening at
Murewell.

'Superb!' he said, but half-mechanically. 'I had no notion a winter's
work would have done so much for you. Was Berlin as stimulating as you
expected? When I heard you had gone, I said to myself--"Well, at least,
now, there is one completely happy person in Europe!"'

'Did you? How easily we all dogmatise about each other?' she said
scornfully. Her manner was by no means simple. He did not feel himself
at all at ease with her. His very embarrassment, however, drove him into
rashness, as often happens.

'I thought I had enough to go upon!' he said in another tone; and his
black eyes, sparkling as though a film had dropped from them, supplied
the reference his words forbore.

She turned away from him with a perceptible drawing up of the whole
figure.

'Will you come and be introduced?' she asked him coldly. He bowed as
coldly and followed her. Wholesome resentment of her manner was denied
him. He _had_ asked for her friendship, and had then gone away and
forgotten her. Clearly what she meant him to see now was that they were
strangers again. Well, she was amply in her right. He suspected that his
allusion to their first talk over the fire had not been unwelcome to
her, as an opportunity.

And he had actually debated whether he should come, lest in spite of
himself she might beguile him once more into those old lapses of will
and common sense! Coxcomb!

He made a few spasmodic efforts at conversation with the lady to whom
she had introduced him, then awkwardly disengaged himself and went to
stand in a corner and study his neighbours.

Close to him, he found, was the poet of the party, got up in the most
correct professional costume--long hair, velvet coat, eyeglass and all.
His extravaganc