er? Is there some new
trouble? Jean, dear man, I am older than you; I have only you. What is
it?"

Jean reached out for his tobacco pouch. "Hilaire," he said very
gravely, after a pause, which he occupied in filling his pipe. "You
remember I asked you to do anything, anything, for a girl named Olive
Agar. You have never heard from her or of her?"

"Never."

"Ah," he sighed, "I have been to Siena. There was some affair--early
in September she came to Florence, to the Lorenzoni of all people in
the world."

Hilaire whistled.

"Yes, I know," the younger man said gloomily, as though he had spoken.
"That woman! What she must have suffered in these months! Well, she
left them suddenly at the beginning of November."

"Where is she now?"

"That's just it. I don't know."

"Why did she leave Siena?"

"There was some trouble--a bad business," he answered reluctantly.
"She lived with some cousins, and one of them committed suicide. She
came away to escape the horror and all the talk, I suppose."

"Ah, I need not ask why she left the Lorenzoni woman. No girl in her
senses would stay an hour longer than she could help with her."

"Hilaire, I think I half hoped to see her at the concert yesterday.
When I came on the platform I looked for her, and I am sure I should
have seen her in that crowd if she had been there. She is different,
somehow. I played like a machine for the first time in my life, I
think, and during the interval the manager asked me why I had not
given the nocturne that was down on the programme. I said something
about a necessary alteration at the last moment, but I don't know now
what I did play. I was thinking of her. A girl alone has a bad time in
this world."

"You are going to find her? Is she in love with you?"

Jean flushed. "I can't answer that."

"That's all right. What I really wanted to know was if you cared for
her. I see you do. Oh, Lord!" The older man sighed heavily as he put
down his coffee-cup. "I wish you would play to me."

Jean went into the music-room, leaving the folding doors between open,
and sat down at the piano. There was no light but the moon's, and
Hilaire saw the beloved head dark against the silvery grey of the wall
beyond. The skilled hands let loose a torrent of harmonies.

"Damn women!" said Hilaire, under cover of the fortissimo.

He spent some hours in the library on the following day re-arranging
and dusting his books, lingering over them, reading a page here