. Then the sitting-room door opened, and
Claude came in.

"What a lot you had to say to each--" she began.

She stopped. Claude's face had stopped her.

"Shall I ring for the waiter to clear away?" she said falteringly, after
a moment of silence.

"He came when Alston and I were in the lobby. I told him to leave it all
till to-morrow. Do you mind?"

"No."

Claude shut the door. His eyes still held the intensity, the blazing
expression which had stopped the words on her lips. Always Claude's
face was expressive. She remembered how forcibly she had been struck by
that fact when she walked airily into Max Elliot's music-room. But she
had never before seen him look as he was looking now. She felt
frightened of him, and almost frightened of herself.

"I had something to say to Alston," Claude said, coming up to her. "I
don't think I could have rested to-night unless I had said it. I'm sure
I couldn't."

"You were telling him again how splendidly--"

"No. He knew what I thought of his work. I told him that before supper.
I had to tell him something else--what I thought of my own."

"What you--what you thought of your own!"

"Yes. What I thought of my own spurious, contemptible, heartless,
soulless, hateful work."

"Claude!" she faltered.

"Don't you know it is so? Don't you know I am right? You may have
deceived yourself in Algeria. You may have deceived yourself even here
at all the rehearsals. But, Charmian"--his eyes pierced her--"do you
dare to tell me that to-night, when you were part of an audience, when
you were linked with those hundreds and hundreds of listeners, do you
dare to tell me you didn't know to-night?"

"How can you--oh, how can you speak like this? Oh, how can you attack
your own child?" she cried, finding in herself still a remnant of will,
a remnant of the fierceness that belongs to deep feeling of any kind.
"It's unworthy. It's cruel, brutal. I can't hear you do it. I won't--"

"Do you mean to tell me that to-night when you sat in the theater you
didn't know? Well, if you do tell me so I shall not believe you. No, I
shall not believe you."

She was silent, remembering her sense of struggle in the theater, her
strong feeling that she was engaged on a sort of horrible, futile fight
against the malign power of the audience.

"You see!" he said. "You dare not tell me you didn't know!"

His eyes were always upon her. She opened her lips. She tried to speak,
to say that she loved the o