hat song is it to be?" Maurice asked, when the tuning process was
complete.

"Swinburne's 'Ask Nothing More.'"

He raised his eyebrows. "A man's song?"

"Yes. But you know I often sing it; and I want to . . . to-night."

"_Qu'y a-t-il, petite soeur_?" he asked, for her manner puzzled him.

"_Rien . . . rien de tout_. Commence."

And he played the soft chords, pregnant with pleading, that usher in
the song.

A moment later, Lenox, leaning back in a canvas chair, sat upright, and
took the cigar from his lips.

"A woman singing? Jove--it's Quita!" he added under his breath. Then
he remained motionless, straining his eyes for a sight of her between
the dancing flames.

Clear and unfaltering her voice soared into the night; and as the song
swept on, through pleading to impassioned longing, the whole awakened
heart of her took fire from the poet's faultless phrases; till, in the
last verse, it spoke straightly and simply to her husband, as though
they two stood alone in the interstellar spaces of the universe.

"I who have love, and no more,
Give you but love of you, sweet;
He that hath more, let him give;
He that hath wings let him soar.
Mine is the heart at your feet . . .
Here that must love you . . . love you, to live!"

The last stupendous chords crashed into silence; and the fall of a
charred twig sounded loud in the pause that followed. Then there came
from the shadowy circle of listeners no clatter of hands and voices,
but a low disjoined murmur;--the very attar of applause.

But by that time Quita was making her way blindly through the outskirts
of the crowd into the blessed region of darkness and stars.

For, as the last words left her lips, the full apprehension of her act
and its possible consequences submerged her in a red-hot wave of shame
and self-consciousness; and before Garth had recovered himself
sufficiently to rise and make the request that hovered on his lips, she
was gone. For a space he sat still, lost in an amazement that swelled
to exultation as the conviction grew in him that at last, after long
and laudable repression, her heart had spoken, indirectly, yet
unmistakably; that now, scandal or no scandal, he must make her
altogether his.

And while he sat stunned to inaction by the vital issues at stake,
Quita hurried on toward the temple, with no purpose in her going save
to escape from the consciousness of human presence. She stood still at
length, and wrung