c contrast to the
rugged hardness which a passionate self-control had shaped upon his
features.... Her heart ached under this astonishment that in this
phantom she could see and know and love his face upon which in life her
eyes had never fallen.

'Go on,' called Charles, from the dress circle.... 'Admirable.... I
never thought you could do it.'

'That's enough,' she replied, with a violent effort to shake free of
her bewilderment and sweet anguish.

'If I meet him,' she said in her heart, 'I shall love him and there
will be nothing else.'

Aloud she said,--

'I must not.'

She had applied herself to the task of furthering Charles's ambition,
and until she had succeeded she would not yield, nor would she seek for
herself in life any advantage or even any natural fulfilment.

Charles came back in a state of excitement.

'It was wonderful,' he said. 'What has happened to you? Your voice is
so full and round. You lose yourself entirely, you speak with a voice
that has in it all the colour and beauty and enchantment of my island.
You move simply, inevitably, so that every gesture is rhythmical, and
like a musical accompaniment to the words.... You'll be an artist.
You are an artist. There has been nothing like it since the old
days.... Duse could not do more with her voice.'

'I didn't know,' she said. 'I didn't know.'

'But I did,' he cried. 'I did. I knew you would become a wonder....
Bother money, bother Butcher, bother Clott, and damn the committee.
Together we shall be irresistible--as we have been. You didn't tell me
you were practising. If that is why you want to be alone I have
nothing to say against it. I've been a selfish brute.'

She was deeply moved. Never before had Charles shown the slightest
thought for her. Human beings as such were nothing to him, but for an
artist, as for art, no trouble was too great, no sacrifice too extreme
for him.

He seized her hands and kissed them over and over again.

'I've been your first audience,' he said. 'Come out now, and I'll buy
you flowers; your room shall be so full of flowers that you can hardly
move through them. As for Verschoyle, he shall pay. It shall be his
privilege to pay for us while we give the world the priceless treasure
that is in us.'

His words rather repelled and hurt her, and in her secret mind she
protested,--

'But I am a woman. But I am a woman.'

It hurt her cruelly that Charles should be blind to that, blin