great head leaning sideways, his eyes half closed, with the
musician's look of mingled voluptuous rapture and cold, grave, listening
intellect, he had a certain majesty. The mother, too, all devout
concentration, was an artist of the right sort; the girls had the gentle
benignity that comes of sincere self-dedication. They pleased Mrs.
Forrester greatly and, as she listened, her severity towards Gregory
shaped itself anew and more forcibly. Narrow, blind, bigoted young man.
And it was amusing to think, as a comment on his fierce consciousness of
Herr Lippheim's unfitness, that here Herr Lippheim was, admitted to the
very heart of Karen's sorrow. It was inconceivable that anyone but very
near and dear friends should have been tolerated by her to-day. Karen,
too, after her fashion, was an artist. The music, no doubt, was helpful
to her. Soft thoughts of her great, lacerated friend, speeding now
towards her solitudes, filled Mrs. Forrester's eyes more than once with
tears.

They finished and Frau Lippheim, rubbing her hands with her
handkerchief, stood smiling near-sightedly, while Mrs. Forrester
expressed her great pleasure and asked all the Lippheims to come and see
her. She planned already a musical. Karen's face showed a pale beam of
gladness.

"And now, my dear child," said Mrs. Forrester, when the Lippheims had
departed and she and Karen were alone and seated side by side on the
sofa, "we must talk. I have come, of course you know, to talk about this
miserable affair." She put her hand on Karen's; but already something in
the girl's demeanour renewed her first displeasure. She looked heavy,
she looked phlegmatic; there was no response, no softness in her glance.

"You have perhaps a message to me, Mrs. Forrester, from Tante," she
said.

"No, Karen, no," Mrs. Forrester with irrepressible severity returned. "I
have no message for you. Any message, I think should come from your
husband and not from your guardian."

Karen sat silent, her eyes moving away from her visitor's face and
fixing themselves on the wall above her head.

The impulse that had brought Mrs. Forrester was suffering alterations.

Gregory had revealed the case to her as worse than she had supposed;
Karen emphasized the revelation. And what of Mercedes between these two
young egoists? "I must ask you, Karen," she said, "whether you realise
how Gregory has behaved, to the woman to whom you, and he, owe so much?"

Karen continued to look fixedly a