oth reposeful and vivid. He wondered if she had heard of
Dick's engagement and if her color covered a pale heart.

Suddenly she flung up her head impatiently, and came behind her father's
chair to clap a small hand over his mouth in the middle of a sentence of
which Norris had entirely lost track.

"Father, father," she cried, "do you think Mr. Norris wants to come here
and maunder over stupid politics all the evening, after he has been
writing stupid editorials about them all day? They _are_ stupid--I've
read some of them." She smiled at the young man. "Wouldn't you both
infinitely rather hear me sing?"

Mr. Elton kissed the offending hand before he put it gently down.

"I know I should."

Norris sprang up.

"May I turn your music?" he asked eagerly, but she shook her head as she
moved away.

"There isn't going to be any music to turn."

She began to sing the same little Roumanian song that he remembered on
their last evening in the Lenox house, and his spirits, lifted for a
moment by her smile, went down again.

"Into the mist I gazed and fear came on me,
Then said the mist, 'I weep for the lost sun.'"

She sang passionately and he could have cried aloud. It was true then
that she was grieving for Dick.

"The music is uncanny, isn't it?" she said, as she ended and found him
near her. "How does it make you feel?"

"If I should find an image for my feelings just at present, you would
scorn me for my base material thoughts."

"Find it," she commanded.

"I think I feel like a mince-pie--a maddening jumble of things delicious
and indigestible."

She laughed and grew friendly. This, he thought, is, after all, her
permanent mood; but before he could take advantage of it another caller,
Mr. Early, appeared; and again she basely deserted Norris to the mercies
of her father and mother, and devoted herself to the evident
beatification of the apostle of the new in art.

CHAPTER XIV

THE RETURN OF RAM JUNA

One gloomy evening in January Mr. Early sat alone. He had so many
tentacles spread out through the world of men and women that solitude
was unusual to him. Indeed it had often occurred to him, as an example
of the fallacy of ancient sayings, that there was nothing in that old
epigram about the loneliness of the great. The higher he had risen in
the scale of greatness the more insistently and persistently had the
world invaded his life, until even his appreciation of solitude had
atrophie