ne of freeing her feet from a quicksand she
turned away from the alluring, dim possibility opened to her by that
look. No, no! No stains, no smears, no shufflings! She was conscious
of no moral impulse, in the usual sense of the word. Her imagination
took in no possibility of actual wrong. But when, with a fastidious
impulse of good taste, she turned her back on something ugly, she
turned her back unwittingly on something worse than ugly.

But it was not easy! Oh, not at all easy! She quailed with a sense of
her own weakness, so unexpected, so frightening. Would she resist it
the next time? How pierced with helpless ecstasy she had been by that
interchange of glances! What was there, in that world, by which she
could steady herself?

"How astonishingly well you play," said Page, rousing himself from the
dreamy silence of appreciation.

"I ought to," she said with conscious bitterness. "I earn my living by
teaching music."

She was aware from across the room of an electric message from Aunt
Victoria protesting against her perversity; and she reflected with
a morose amusement that however delicately phrased Aunt Victoria's
protests might be, its substance was the same as that of Helene,
crying out on her for not adding the soupcon of rouge. She took a
sudden resolution. Well, why not? Everything conspired to push her
in that direction. The few factors which did not were mere imbecile
idealism, or downright hypocrisy. She drew a long breath. She smiled
at Page, a smile of reference to something in common between them.
"Shan't I play you some Beethoven?" she asked, "something with a
legato passage and great solemn chords, and a silver melody binding
the whole together?"

"Oh yes, do!" he said softly. And in a moment she was putting all of
her intelligence, her training, and her capacity to charm into the
tones of the E-flat Minuet.

CHAPTER XXIX

A HYPOTHETICAL LIVELIHOOD

The millionaire proprietor had asked them all over to the Austin Farm,
and as they drew near the end of the very expensive and delicately
served meal which Page had spoken of as a "picnic-lunch," various
plans for the disposition of the afternoon were suggested. These
suggestions were prefaced by the frank statement of the owner of the
place that whatever else the others did, it was his own intention to
take Miss Marshall through a part of his pine plantations and explain
his recent forestry operations to her. The assumption that Miss