ime! Perhaps a little bit too
ambitious a choice, eh? We must all be ambitious, but we must know our
limitations, too. Some other time!"

Then Mr. Pomeroy was gone and Mark left to bitterest reflection.

But he recovered very sensibly from his boyish chagrin, and very
sensibly went at his practicing again. On this particular Saturday
afternoon he attacked a certain phrase in the bass, and for almost an
hour the big fingers of his left hand rippled over it steadily. Mark,
twisted about halfway on the bench, watched the performance steadily,
his right hand hanging loose.

"Damn!" he said presently, with a weary sigh, as a sharp and familiar
little pain sprang into his left wrist.

"Mark!" breathed a reproachful voice behind him. He whirled about, to
see Julia Page.

She had come noiselessly in at the glass doorway behind him, and was
standing there, laughing, a picture of fresh and demure beauty, despite
the varied colours in hat and waist and gown and gloves.

"I had to see you!" said Julia, in a rush. "And nobody answered your
telephone--there's a rehearsal of that play at the theatre to-day, so I
can't meet you--and the janitor let me in----"

Mark found her incoherence delicious; her being here, in his own
familiar stamping-ground, one of the thrilling and exciting episodes of
his life. He could have shouted--have danced for pure joy as he jumped
up to welcome her. Julia declared that she had to "fly," but Mark
insisted--and she found his insistence curiously pleasant--upon showing
her about, leading her from office to office, beaming at her whenever
their eyes met. And he _must_ play her the little Schumann, he said, but
no--for that Julia positively would _not_ wait; she jerked him by one hand
toward the door. Mark had his second kiss before they emerged laughing
and radiant into the gaiety of Kearney Street on a Saturday afternoon.

And Julia was not late for her rehearsal, or, if late, she was at least
earlier by a full quarter hour than the rest of the caste. She took an
orchestra seat in the empty auditorium at the doorkeeper's suggestion,
and yawned, and stared at the coatless back of a man who was tuning the
orchestra piano.

Presently two distinguished looking girls, beautifully dressed, came in,
and sat down near her in a rather uncertain way, and began to laugh and
talk in low tones. Neither cast a glance at Julia, who promptly decided
that they were hateful snobs, and began to regard them with bu