articular. When he had finished he turned to Katharine.

"How he has grown!" she cried. "What the three last years have done for
him! He used to write only the tragedies of passion; but this is the
tragedy of the soul, the shadow coexistent with the soul. This is the
tragedy of effort and failure, the thing Keats called hell. This is my
tragedy, as I lie here spent by the racecourse, listening to the feet of
the runners as they pass me. Ah, God! The swift feet of the runners!"

She turned her face away and covered it with her straining hands.
Everett crossed over to her quickly and knelt beside her. In all
the days he had known her she had never before, beyond an occasional
ironical jest, given voice to the bitterness of her own defeat. Her
courage had become a point of pride with him, and to see it going
sickened him.

"Don't do it," he gasped. "I can't stand it, I really can't, I feel it
too much. We mustn't speak of that; it's too tragic and too vast."

When she turned her face back to him there was a ghost of the old,
brave, cynical smile on it, more bitter than the tears she could not
shed. "No, I won't be so ungenerous; I will save that for the watches
of the night when I have no better company. Now you may mix me another
drink of some sort. Formerly, when it was not _if_ I should ever sing
Brunnhilde, but quite simply when I _should_ sing Brunnhilde, I was
always starving myself and thinking what I might drink and what I might
not. But broken music boxes may drink whatsoever they list, and no
one cares whether they lose their figure. Run over that theme at the
beginning again. That, at least, is not new. It was running in his head
when we were in Venice years ago, and he used to drum it on his glass at
the dinner table. He had just begun to work it out when the late autumn
came on, and the paleness of the Adriatic oppressed him, and he decided
to go to Florence for the winter, and lost touch with the theme during
his illness. Do you remember those frightful days? All the people who
have loved him are not strong enough to save him from himself! When
I got word from Florence that he had been ill I was in Nice filling
a concert engagement. His wife was hurrying to him from Paris, but I
reached him first. I arrived at dusk, in a terrific storm. They had
taken an old palace there for the winter, and I found him in the
library--a long, dark room full of old Latin books and heavy furniture
and bronzes. He was sitting