n thousand
charms that touch the soul.' She made a tour of the beautiful room where
she had received him, singling out this treasure or that from the spoils
of a hundred bric-a-brac shops, laughing over her quests, discoveries,
and bargainings. And when he asked if she would delight him again with a
favourite piece of his which he had heard her play at another house, she
consented at once.

She played with a perfection of execution and feeling that moved him now
as it had moved him before. 'You are a musician born,' he said quietly
when she had finished, and the last tremor of the music had passed away.
'I knew that before I first heard you.'

'I have played a great deal ever since I can remember. It has been a
great comfort to me,' she said simply, and half-turned to him smiling.
'When did you first detect music in me? Oh, of course: I was at the
opera. But that wouldn't prove much, would it?'

'No,' he said abstractedly, his sense still busy with the music that
had just ended. 'I think I knew it the first time I saw you.' Then
understanding of his own words came to him, and turned him rigid. For
the first time the past had been invoked.

There was a short silence. Mrs Manderson looked at Trent, then hastily
looked away. Colour began to rise in her cheeks, and she pursed her lips
as if for whistling. Then with a defiant gesture of the shoulders which
he remembered she rose suddenly from the piano and placed herself in a
chair opposite to him.

'That speech of yours will do as well as anything,' she began slowly,
looking at the point of her shoe, 'to bring us to what I wanted to say.
I asked you here today on purpose, Mr Trent, because I couldn't bear it
any longer. Ever since the day you left me at White Gables I have been
saying to myself that it didn't matter what you thought of me in that
affair; that you were certainly not the kind of man to speak to others
of what you believed about me, after what you had told me of your
reasons for suppressing your manuscript. I asked myself how it could
matter. But all the time, of course, I knew it did matter. It mattered
horribly. Because what you thought was not true.' She raised her eyes
and met his gaze calmly. Trent, with a completely expressionless face,
returned her look.

'Since I began to know you,' he said, 'I have ceased to think it.'
'Thank you,' said Mrs Manderson; and blushed suddenly and deeply. Then,
playing with a glove, she added, 'But I want you to kno