ry, we
grant you, in all those twenty long years. But if you ask us our
opinion--our private opinion--it is that she scarcely heard of him,
if she heard at all, and certainly never set eyes on him, until one
day her madcap little daughter brought him home, half-killed by
an electric shock, in a cab we were at some pains to describe
accurately a few pages ago. And even then, had it not been for the
individualities of that cab, she might have missed seeing him, and let
him go away to the infirmary or the police-station, and probably never
been near him again.

As it was, the face she saw when a freak of chance led to her following
that cab, and looking in out of mere curiosity at its occupant, was the
face of her old lover--of her husband. Eighteen--twenty--years had
made a man of one who was then little more than a boy. The mark of the
world he had lived in was on him; and it was the mark of a rough,
strong world where one fights, and, if one is a man of this sort, maybe
wins. But she never doubted his identity for a moment. And the way in
which she grasped the situation--above all, the fact that he had not
recognised her and would not recognise her--quite justified, to our
thinking, Major Roper's opinion of her powers of self-command.

Nevertheless, these were not so absolute that her demeanour escaped
comment from the cabby, the only witness of her first sight of the
"electrocuted" man. He spoke of her afterwards as that squealing party
down that sanguinary little turning off Shepherd's Bush Road he took
that sanguinary galvanic shock to.

CHAPTER IX

HOW THOSE GIRLS DO CHATTER OVER THEIR MUSIC! MRS. NIGHTINGALE'S
RESOLUTION. BUT, THE RISK! A HARD PART TO PLAY. THERE WAS ONLY MAMMA
FOR THE GIRL! THE GARDEN OF LONG AGO

Two parts in a sestet, played alone, may be a maddening torture to
a person whose musical imagination is not equal to supplying the other
four. Perhaps you have heard Haydn, Op. 1704, and rejoiced in the
logical consecutiveness of its fugues, the indisputableness of its
well-classified statements, the swift pertinence of the repartees of
the first violin to the second, the apt _resume_ and orderly
reorganization of their epigrammatic interchanges by the 'cello and
the double-bass, the steady typewritten report and summary of the
whole by the pianoforte, and the regretful exception to so many points
taken by the clarionet. If so, you have no doubt felt, as we have, a
sense of perfect sa