R'rirha. He was very pale, had dark circles beneath his eyes. The
incessant work was beginning to tell upon him severely. Charmian saw
that. But how could she beg him to rest now, when Jernington had come
out, when it was so vital to their interests that the opera should be
finished as soon as possible! Besides, she was certain that even if she
spoke Claude would not listen to her. Jernington, so he said, always
gave him an impetus, always excited him. It was a keen pleasure to show
a man of such deep knowledge what he had been doing, a keener pleasure
still when he approved, when he said, in his German voice, "That goes!"
And they had been trying over passages with instrumentalists who had
been "unearthed," as Jernington expressed it, in Algiers. They had got
hold of a horn player, had found another man who played the clarinet,
the violin, and a third instrument.

In fact, they were living for, and in, the opera. And Charmian, devoured
by her secret ambition, had no heart to play a careful wife's part. She
had the will to urge her man on. She had no will to hold him back.
Afterward he could rest, he should rest--on the bed of his laurels.

She smiled now when she thought of that.

Presently she felt that some one was approaching her. She looked up and
saw Jernington coming down the path, wiping his pale forehead with a
silk handkerchief in which various colors seemed fortuitously combined.

"Is the work over?" she cried out to him.

He threw up one square-nailed white hand.

"No. But for once he has got a passage all wrong. I have left him to
correct it. He kicked me out, in fact!"

Jernington threw back his head and laughed gutturally. His laugh always
contradicted his eyes. They were romantic, but his laugh was prosaic.

He sat down by Charmian and put his hands on his knees. One still
grasped the handkerchief.

"Dear Mr. Jernington, tell me!" she said. "You know so much. Claude says
your knowledge is extraordinary. Isn't the opera fine?"

Now Jernington was a specialist, and he was one of those men who cannot
detach their minds from the subject in which they specialize in order to
take a broad view. His vision was extraordinarily acute, but it was
strictly limited. When Charmian spoke of the opera he believed he was
thinking of the opera as a whole, whereas he was in reality only
thinking about the orchestration of it.

"It is superb!" he replied enthusiastically. "Never before have I had a
pupil with s