tancy. She had let fall some word, at their last meeting, of a
taste for music. Trent went that evening, and thenceforward regularly,
to the opera. He might see her; and if, in spite of his caution, she
caught sight of him, they could be blind to each other's
presence--anybody might happen to go to the opera.

So he went alone each evening, passing as quickly as he might through
the people in the vestibule; and each evening he came away knowing that
she had not been in the house. It was a habit that yielded him a sort of
satisfaction along with the guilty excitement of his search; for he too
loved music, and nothing gave him so much peace while its magic endured.

* * * * *

One night as he entered, hurrying through the brilliant crowd, he felt a
touch on his arm. Flooded with an incredible certainty at the touch, he
turned.

It was she: so much more radiant in the absence of grief and anxiety, in
the fact that she was smiling, and in the allurement of evening dress,
that he could not speak. She, too, breathed a little quickly, and there
was a light of daring in her eyes and cheeks as she greeted him.

Her words were few. "I wouldn't miss a note of _Tristan_," she said,
"nor must you. Come and see me in the interval." She gave him the number
of the box.

CHAPTER XII

ERUPTION

The following two months were a period in Trent's life that he has never
since remembered without shuddering. He met Mrs. Manderson half a dozen
times, and each time her cool friendliness, a nicely calculated mean
between mere acquaintance and the first stage of intimacy, baffled and
maddened him. At the opera he had found her, to his further amazement,
with a certain Mrs. Wallace, a frisky matron whom he had known from
childhood. Mrs. Manderson, it appeared, on her return from Italy, had
somehow wandered into circles to which he belonged by nurture and
disposition. It came, she said, of her having pitched her tent in their
hunting-grounds; several of his friends were near neighbors.

He had a dim but horrid recollection of having been on that occasion
unlike himself, ill at ease, burning in the face, talking with idiot
loquacity of his adventures in the Baltic provinces, and finding from
time to time that he was addressing himself exclusively to Mrs. Wallace.
The other lady, when he joined them, had completely lost the slight
appearance of agitation with which she had stopped him in the vestibule.