of the evening with a professor of archaeology from Berlin.

His other resolution was that he would not be with her alone.

But when, a few days after, she wrote asking him to come and see her on
the following afternoon, he made no attempt to excuse himself. This was
a formal challenge.

* * * * *

While she celebrated the rites of tea, and for some little time
thereafter, she joined with such natural ease in his slightly fevered
conversation on matters of the day that he began to hope she had changed
what he could not doubt had been her resolve, to corner him and speak to
him gravely. She was to all appearances careless now, smiling so that he
recalled, not for the first time since that night at the opera, what was
written long ago of a Princess of Brunswick: "Her mouth has ten thousand
charms that touch the soul." She made a tour of the beautiful room where
she had received him, singling out this treasure or that from the spoils
of a hundred bric-a-brac shops, laughing over her quests, discoveries
and bargainings. And when he asked if she would delight him again with a
favorite piece of his which he had heard her play at another house, she
consented at once.

She played with a perfection of execution and feeling that moved him now
as it had moved him before. "You are a musician born," he said quietly
when she had finished, and the last tremor of the music had passed away.
"I knew that before I first heard you play."

"I have played a great deal ever since I can remember. It has been a
great comfort to me," she said simply, and half-turned to him smiling.
"When did you first detect music in me? Oh, of course! I was at the
opera. But that wouldn't prove much, would it?"

"No," he said, abstractedly, his sense still busy with the music that
had just ended. "I think I knew it the first time I saw you." Then
understanding of his own words came to him, and turned him rigid. For
the first time the past had been invoked.

There was a short silence. Mrs. Manderson looked at Trent, then hastily
looked away. Color began to rise in her cheeks, and she pursed her lips
as if for whistling. Then with a defiant gesture of the shoulders which
he remembered she rose suddenly from the piano and placed herself in a
chair opposite to him.

"That speech of yours will do as well as anything," she began slowly,
looking at the point of her shoe, "to bring us to what I wanted to say.
I asked you here to