se, but was a thing as cold and relentless as was the waste
of waters across which it had shone in the past.

Billy did not understand it. She knew, it is true, of Cyril's reputed
aversion to women in general and to noise; but she was neither women in
general nor noise, she told herself indignantly. She was only the little
maid, grown three years older, who had sat at his feet and adoringly
listened to all that he had been pleased to say in the old days at the
top of the Strata. And he had been kind then--very kind, Billy declared
stoutly. He had been patient and interested, too, and he had seemed not
only willing, but glad to teach her, while now--

Sometimes Billy thought she would ask him candidly what was the matter.
But it was always the old, frank Billy that thought this; the impulsive
Billy, that had gone up to Cyril's rooms years before and cheerfully
announced that she had come to get acquainted. It was never the
sensible, circumspect Billy that Aunt Hannah had for three years
been shaping and coaxing into being. But even this Billy frowned
rebelliously, and declared that sometime something should be said that
would at least give him a chance to explain.

In all the weeks since Billy's purchase of Hillside, Cyril had been
there only twice, and it was nearly Thanksgiving now. Billy had seen
him once or twice, also, at the Beacon Street house, when she and Aunt
Hannah had dined there; but on all these occasions he had been either
the coldly reserved guest or the painfully punctilious host. Never had
he been in the least approachable.

"He treats me exactly as he treated poor little Spunk that first night,"
Billy declared hotly to herself.

Only once since she came had Billy heard Cyril play, and that was
when she had shared the privilege with hundreds of others at a public
concert. She had sat then entranced, with her eyes on the clean-cut
handsome profile of the man who played with so sure a skill and power,
yet without a note before him. Afterward she had met him face to face,
and had tried to tell him how moved she was; but in her agitation, and
because of a strange shyness that had suddenly come to her, she had
ended only in stammering out some flippant banality that had brought to
his face merely a bored smile of acknowledgment.

Twice she had asked him to play for her; but each time he had begged to
be excused, courteously, but decidedly.

"It's no use to tease," Bertram had interposed once, with an