nd clenched his teeth for him. It made the hand
that had been hanging loose over the uncomfortable chair-back close
savagely on something--a throat, perhaps, that his imagination
supplied? How like he looked, thought his companion, to himself on one
occasion twenty years ago! But his anger now was on her behalf alone;
it was not so in that dreadful time she hoped he might never recollect.
If only his memory of all the past might remain as now, a book with
a locked clasp and a lost key!

She watched him as he sat there, and saw a calmer mood come back upon
him. Each wanted a _raison d'etre_ for a silent pause, and neither was
sorry for the desire each might ascribe to the other of hearing the
last movement of the music undisturbed. Op. 999 was prospering,
there was no doubt of it! Laetitia Wilson was a very fair example of
a creditable career at the R.A.M. But she was not quite equal to this
unfortunate victim of a too nervous system, who could play like an
angel for half an hour, mind you--not more. This was his half-hour;
and it was quite reasonable for Fenwick to take for granted that his
hostess would like to pay attention to it, or _vice-versa_. So both
sat silent.

But as she sat listening to Op. 999, and watching wonderingly the
strange victim of oblivion, of whom she knew--scarcely acknowledging
it always, though--that she had once for a short time called him
husband, her mind went back to an old time when he and she were young:
before the tragic memory that she sometimes thought might have been
lived down had come into her life and his. And a scene rose up before
her out of that old time--a scene of young men, almost boys, and girls
who but the other day were in the nursery, playing lawn-tennis in a
happy garden, with never a thought for anything in this wide world but
themselves, and each other, and the scoring, and how jolly it would be
in the house-boat at Henley to-morrow. And then this garden-scene
a little later in the moonrise, and herself and one of the players,
who was Gerry--this very man--left by the other two to themselves,
on a garden-seat his arm hung over, just as it did now over that
chair-back. How exactly he sat then as he sat now, his other hand in
charge of the foot he had crossed on his knee, just as now, to keep
it from a slip along his lawn-tennis flannels! How well she could
remember the tennis-shoe, with its ribbed rubber sole, in place of
that highly-polished calf thing! And she could