limitations, liberated into an empyrean of song. If
anything, she advanced too rapidly, and Peter's greatest task was to
restrain her optimism and self-confidence by imposing the drudgery of
fundamental principles. And when he found that she was practicing too
long, he set her limits of half-hour periods beyond which she must not
go. But she was young and strong and only once had he noted the
slightest symptom of wear and tear on her vocal chords, when he had
closed the piano and prohibited the home work for forty-eight hours.

As to their personal relations, Peter had already noticed a difference
in his own conduct toward Beth, and in hers toward him,--a shade of
restraint in Beth's conversation when not on the topic of music, which
contrasted rather strangely with the candor of their first meetings.
Peter couldn't help smiling at his memories, for now Beth seemed to be
upon her good behavior, repaying him for her earlier contempt with a
kind of awe at his attainments. He caught her sometimes in unguarded
moments looking at him curiously, as though in wonder at a mystery which
could not be explained. And to tell the truth, Peter wondered a little,
too, at his complete absorption in the task he had set himself. He tried
to believe that it was only the music that impelled him, only the joy of
an accomplished musician in the discovery of a budding artist, but he
knew that it was something more than these. For reducing the theorem to
different terms, he was obliged to confess that if the girl had been any
one but Beth, no matter how promising her voice, he must have been bored
to extinction. No. He had to admit that it was Beth that interested him,
Beth the primitive, Beth the mettlesome, Beth the demure. For if now
demure she was never dull. The peculiarity of their situation--of their
own choosing--lent a spice to the relationship which made each of them
aware that the other was young and desirable--and that the world was
very far away.

However far Beth's thoughts may have carried her in the contemplation of
the personal pulchritude of her music master (somewhat enhanced by the
extirpation of the Hellion triplet in her own behalf) it was Peter
Nicholaevitch who made the task of Peter Nichols difficult. It was the
Grand Duke Peter who wanted to take this peasant woman in his arms and
teach her what other peasant girls had been taught by Grand Dukes since
the beginning of the autocratic system of which he had been a part