the Embassy? That would be nice! She
could bring her mother or one of her brothers? She would rather come
with a girl friend. Very well, to-morrow?

On the morrow she came.

Reggie hated playing in public. He said that it was like stripping
naked before a multitude, or like having to read one's own love
letters aloud in a divorce court. But there is nothing more soothing
than to play to one attentive listener, especially if that listener
be feminine and if the interest shown be that personal interest, which
with so many women takes the place of true appreciation, and which
looks over the art to the artist.

Yae came with the girl friend, a lean and skinny half-caste girl
like a gipsy, whom Yae patronized. She came once again with the girl
friend; and then she came alone.

Reggie was relieved, and said so. Yae laughed and replied:

"But I brought her for your own sake; I always go everywhere by
myself."

"Then please don't take me into consideration ever again," answered
Reggie.

So those afternoons began which so soon darkened into evenings, while
Reggie sat at the piano playing his thoughts aloud, and the girl
lay on the sofa or squatted on the big cushion by the fire, with
cigarettes within reach and a glass of liqueur, wrapped in an
atmosphere of laziness and well-being such as she had never known
before. Then Reggie would stop playing. He would sit down beside her,
or he would take her on his knee; and they would talk.

He talked as poets talk, weaving stories out of nothing, finding
laughter and tears in what she would have passed by unnoticed. She
talked to him about herself, about the daily doings of her home,
its sadness and isolation since her father died. He had been the
playfellow of her childhood. He had never grudged his time or his
money for her amusement. She had been brought up like a little
princess. She had been utterly spoiled. He had transferred to her
precocious mind his love of excitement, his inquisitiveness, his
courage and his lack of scruple; and then, when she was sixteen, he
had died, leaving as his last command to the Japanese wife who would
obey him in death as she had obeyed him living, the strict injunction
that Yae was to have her own way always and in everything.

He left a respectable fortune, a Japanese widow and two worthless
sons.

Poor Yae! Surrounded by the friends and amusements of an English
girl's life, the qualities of her happy disposition might have borne
thei