yes full of laughter as he answered:

"Certainly, I am naturally unappreciative of music."

"I didn't mean that," Katrine explained, smiling back at him as she went
along the corridor.

"Miss Dulany!" he called.

She turned toward him, her face waiting and expectant.

"As the German girl said in _Rudder Grange_, 'It is very loneful here.'"

"You mean," she asked, "that you would like to have me stay with you?"

"Nobody on earth could have stated my wish more accurately," he
answered, in a merry, impersonal tone, as though addressing some
imaginary third person.

She came back to him, drawing a low wicker chair near the couch and
putting her music on the floor beside her. "I shall be glad to stay if
you want me to. Shall we talk?" And here she took up the books he had
put beside him for amusement. "Balzac, Daudet." She made a little
disapproving gesture.

"You do not care for them?" he asked.

"They are not for me, those horrible realist folk. I like books where
things fall as they should rather than as they do; and the poetry where
beautiful things happen. Things as they aren't are what I care for in
literature."

He laughed. "We won't read," he said, "and _I_ sha'n't talk. You must.
All about yourself, the wonderful things that you have been living and
achieving. You will tell it all in just your own way, full of quick
pauses and sentences finished by funny little gestures."

This was dangerous walking, and he felt it on the instant.

But the Irish of the girl, the instinct to make a story, to entertain,
came at his demanding, bringing the old gleam back to her eyes.

"Ah!" she said, deprecatingly. "The tale of me! It would bore you, would
it not? It is just full of Josef and work and the Countess and Father
Menalis and a few great names, and then more work, with a little more
Josef," she added, with a smile. And then dropping into the warm,
sweet, intimate tones he remembered so well, she said, simply, "It was
hard, but glorious in a way, too," she added, after a moment's thinking,
"every morning to awaken with the thought of something most important to
do; work which one loves, lessons with this great, great soul who knows
why art is! The languages for one's art, the fencing for one's art, the
eating, breathing, dancing, thinking, living for one's art! With Josef's
eternal 'Think it over! Think it over!' and Paris with all of its
beautiful past! And there were lonesome days, too, when I felt I could