ne.

He looked at her fixedly, eagerly. She could do nothing but walk on in
silence.

"Even an actor does not impress himself so directly upon his fellows as
a woman of--well, a woman like yourself. A painter, a writer, a
musician, never comes in touch at all with his public. We hear his name,
we admire or we decry his works, but the man or the woman who has
toiled, and felt, and lived, is unknown to us. He is lost in his work."

Hadria gave a murmur of assent.

"But you, Mrs. Temperley, have a very different story to tell. It is
_you_, yourself, your personality, in all its many-sided charm that we
all bow to; it is _you_, not your achievements that--that we love."

Hadria cleared her throat; the words would not come. A rebellious little
nerve was twitching at her eye-lid. After all, what in heaven's name was
she to say? It was too foolish to pretend to misunderstand; for tone,
look, manner all told the same story; yet even now there was nothing
absolutely definite to reply to, and her cleverness of retort had
deserted her.

"Ah! Mrs. Temperley--Hadria----" Professor Theobald had stopped short in
the path, and then Hadria made some drowning effort to resist the force
that she still feared. But it was in vain. She stood before him, paler
even than usual, with her head held high, but eye-lids that drooped and
lips that trembled. The movement of the leaves made faint quivering
little shadows on her white gown, and stirred delicately over the lace
at her throat. The emotion that possessed her, the mixture of joy and
dismay and even terror, passed across her face, in the moment's silence.
The two figures stood opposite to one another; Hadria drawing a little
away, swayed slightly backward, the Professor eagerly bending forward.
He was on the point of speaking, when there came floating through the
wood, the sound of a woman's voice singing. The voice was swiftly
recognised by them both, and the song.

Hadria's eye-lids lifted for a second, and her breathing quickened.

"Oh, gather me the rose, the rose,
While yet in flower we find it;
For summer smiles, but summer goes,
And winter waits behind it.

"For with the dream foregone, foregone,
The deed foreborne for ever,
The worm regret will canker on,
And time will turn him never."

Professor Theobald advanced a step. Hadria drew back.

"So well it were to love, my lo