be as
complete as a sonata by Bach or Beethoven; but his appreciation was
suddenly interrupted by someone looking at him.

At a little distance, Evelyn stood looking at him. The moment she had
seen him she had stopped, and her eyes were delighted as by a vision.
Though he represented to her the completely unknown, she seemed to have
known him always in her heart; she seemed to have been waiting for
knowledge of this unknown, and the rumour of the future grew loud in her
ears.

He raised his eyes and saw a tall, fair girl dressed in pale green. Mr.
Innes introduced them.

"My daughter--Sir Owen Asher."

In the little while which he took to decide whether he would take tea or
coffee, he thought that something could be said for her figure, and he
liked her hair, but, on the whole, he did not think he cared for her.
She seemed to him an unimportant variety of what he had met before. He
said he would take tea, and then he changed his mind and said he would
have coffee, but Evelyn came back with a cup of tea, and perceiving her
mistake, she laughed abstractedly.

"You are going to sing two songs, Miss Innes. I'm glad; I hear your
voice is wonderful."

The sound of his voice conveyed a penetrating sense of his presence. It
was the same happiness which the very sight of him had awakened in her,
and she felt herself yielding to it as to a current. She was borne far
away into mists of dream, where she seemed to live a long while. Time
seemed to have ceased and the outside world to have fallen behind her.
The sensation was the most delicious she had ever experienced. She
hardly heard the answers that she made to his questions, and when her
father called her, it was like returning after a long absence.

She sang much more beautifully than he had expected, and during the
preludes and fugues and the sonatas by Bach, which finished the
programme, he thought of her voice, occasionally questioning himself
regarding his taste for her. Even in this short while he had come to
like her better. She had beautiful teeth and hair, and he liked her
figure, notwithstanding the fact that her shoulders sloped a
little--perhaps because they did slope a little. He noticed, whether her
eyes wandered or remained fixed, that they returned to him, and that
their glance was one of interrogation, as if all depended upon him. When
the concert was over he was anxious to speak to her, so that he grew
impatient with the people who stopped his way. The