dly. She smiled. 'How little I imagined that first evening that
you cared for music!'

'Or about anything else worth caring for?' he asked her, laughing, but
with always that little melancholy note in the laugh.

'Oh, if you like,' she said, with a shrug of her white shoulders. 'I
believe you talked to Catherine the whole of the first evening, when
you weren't reading "Hamlet" in the corner, about the arrangements for
women's education at Oxford.'

'Could I have found a more respectable subject?' he inquired of her.

'The adjective is excellent,' she said with a little face, as she put
her violin into its case. 'If I remember right, Catherine and I felt it
personal. None of us were ever educated, except in arithmetic, sewing,
English history, the Catechism, and "Paradise Lost."--I taught myself
French at seventeen, because one Moliere wrote plays in it, and German
because of Wagner. But they are _my_ French and _my_ German. I wouldn't
advise anybody else to steal them!'

Langham was silent, watching the movements of the girl's agile fingers.

'I wonder,' he said at last, slowly, 'when I shall play that Beethoven
again?'

'To-morrow morning if you have a conscience,' she said dryly; 'we
murdered one or two passages in fine style.'

He looked at her, startled. 'But I go by the morning train!' There was
an instant silence. Then the violin case shut with a snap.

'I thought it was to be Saturday,' she said abruptly.

'No,' he answered with a sigh, 'it was always Friday. There is a meeting
in London I must get to to-morrow afternoon.'

'Then we shan't finish these Hungarian duets,' she said slowly, turning
away from him to collect some music on the piano.

Suddenly a sense of the difference between the week behind him, with all
its ups and downs, its quarrels, its _ennuis_, its moments of delightful
intimity, of artistic freedom and pleasure, and those threadbare,
monotonous weeks into which he was to slip back on the morrow, awoke in
him a mad inconsequent sting of disgust, of self-pity.

'No, we shall finish nothing,' he said in a voice which only she could
hear, his hands lying on the keys; 'there are some whose destiny it is
never to finish--never to have enough--to leave the feast on the tables
and all the edges of life ragged!'

Her lips trembled. They were far away, in the vast room, from the group
Lady Charlotte was lecturing. Her nerves were all unsteady with music
and feeling, and the face looking d