train of solitary melody. The clanging minor harmonies into
which the march relapses came to their abrupt end. Theron rose once
more, and moved with a hesitating step to the piano.

"I want to rest a little," he said, with his hand on her shoulder.

"Whew! so do I," exclaimed Celia, letting her hands fall with an
exaggerated gesture of weariness. "The sonatas take it out of one! They
are hideously difficult, you know. They are rarely played."

"I didn't know," remarked Theron. She seemed not to mind his hand upon
her shoulder, and he kept it there. "I didn't know anything about music
at all. What I do know now is that--that this evening is an event in my
life."

She looked up at him and smiled. He read unsuspected tendernesses and
tolerances of friendship in the depths of her eyes, which emboldened
him to stir the fingers of that audacious hand in a lingering, caressing
trill upon her shoulder. The movement was of the faintest, but having
ventured it, he drew his hand abruptly away.

"You are getting on," she said to him. There was an enigmatic twinkle
in the smile with which she continued to regard him. "We are Hellenizing
you at a great rate."

A sudden thought seemed to strike her. She shifted her eyes toward
vacancy with a swift, abstracted glance, reflected for a moment, then
let a sparkling half-wink and the dimpling beginnings of an almost
roguish smile mark her assent to the conceit, whatever it might be.

"I will be with you in a moment," he heard her say; and while the words
were still in his ears she had risen and passed out of sight through
the broad, open doorway to the right. The looped curtains fell together
behind her. Presently a mellow light spread over their delicately
translucent surface--a creamy, undulating radiance which gave the effect
of moving about among the myriad folds of the silk.

Theron gazed at these curtains for a little, then straightened his
shoulders with a gesture of decision, and, turning on his heel, went
over and examined the statues in the further corners minutely.

"If you would like some more, I will play you the Berceuse now."

Her voice came to him with a delicious shock. He wheeled round and
beheld her standing at the piano, with one hand resting, palm upward,
on the keys. She was facing him. Her tall form was robed now in some
shapeless, clinging drapery, lustrous and creamy and exquisitely soft,
like the curtains. The wonderful hair hung free and luxuriant about