ough the brilliant crowd, he felt a
touch on his arm. Flooded with an incredible certainty at the touch, he
turned.

It was she: so much more radiant in the absence of grief and anxiety, in
the fact that she was smiling, and in the allurement of evening dress,
that he could not speak. She, too, breathed a little quickly, and there
was a light of daring in her eyes and cheeks as she greeted him.

Her words were few. 'I wouldn't miss a note of Tristan,' she said, 'nor
must you. Come and see me in the interval.' She gave him the number of
the box.

CHAPTER XIII: Eruption

The following two months were a period in Trent's life that he has never
since remembered without shuddering. He met Mrs Manderson half a dozen
times, and each time her cool friendliness, a nicely calculated mean
between mere acquaintance and the first stage of intimacy, baffled and
maddened him. At the opera he had found her, to his further amazement,
with a certain Mrs Wallace, a frisky matron whom he had known from
childhood. Mrs Manderson, it appeared, on her return from Italy, had
somehow wandered into circles to which he belonged by nurture and
disposition. It came, she said, of her having pitched her tent in their
hunting-grounds; several of his friends were near neighbours. He had
a dim but horrid recollection of having been on that occasion unlike
himself, ill at ease, burning in the face, talking with idiot loquacity
of his adventures in the Baltic provinces, and finding from time to time
that he was addressing himself exclusively to Mrs Wallace. The other
lady, when he joined them, had completely lost the slight appearance
of agitation with which she had stopped him in the vestibule. She had
spoken pleasantly to him of her travels, of her settlement in London,
and of people whom they both knew.

During the last half of the opera, which he had stayed in the box to
hear, he had been conscious of nothing, as he sat behind them, but the
angle of her cheek and the mass of her hair, the lines of her shoulder
and arm, her hand upon the cushion. The black hair had seemed at last
a forest, immeasurable, pathless and enchanted, luring him to a fatal
adventure.... At the end he had been pale and subdued, parting with them
rather formally.

The next time he saw her--it was at a country house where both were
guests--and the subsequent times, he had had himself in hand. He had
matched her manner and had acquitted himself, he thought, decently,