he could not resent his care. She gave in to it with a
sense of helplessness.

Soon after lunch her head started aching. She suggested a brisk walk.
The air might do her good. But he persuaded her to lie down on the
couch instead. The touch of his fingers on her hot forehead was
soothing, too soothing. She relaxed luxuriously, closing her eyes,
subdued, indifferent.

He was saying:

"What will you do, beloved, if you are taken ill in South America?
No Oliver to care for you. I can't bear to think of it." Suddenly,
he laid his cheek against hers. "If anything happens to you, I shall
go mad."

She sat up with a swift movement that brought back an almost
intolerable pain.

"Nothing will happen," she tried to say, and found herself weakly
sobbing in his arms.

It was time to dress. She did her hair, to please Oliver, in a
girlish way, parted and knotted low. Her gown, designed by Martigues,
did not fit in with this simple coiffure. She was aware of an
incongruity between the smooth, yellow bands of hair meekly
confining her small head, and the daring peacock-blue draperies
flowing in long, free lines from her shoulders, held lightly in at
the waist by a golden cord.

"One will get the better of the other before the evening is over,"
she thought with a sigh, turning away from her mirror.

"My beautiful Myra!" Oliver said as if to cheer her.

"I have never looked worse," she retorted a trifle impatiently, and
would not argue the point as they drove up town.

"We'll see what I really amount to now," she told herself.

She had never before so tensely faced an audience, but there was
more at stake than she cared to confess, and she was not equal to it.
She shone, but did not blind those thousand eyes; she sang but did
not cast enchantment. And David Cannon would not help her. He sat at
the piano, uncouth, impassive, deliberately detached, as if he gave
her and his music over to an anonymous crowd of whose existence he
was hardly aware. There was something huge and static about him,
something elemental as an earth-shape, containing in and by itself
mysterious rhythms. His songs were things of faun-like humours,
terrible, tender, mocking, compassionate. They called for an entire
abandon, for witchery, for passion swayed and swaying; but although
at times Myra's voice held a Pan-like flutiness, although an
occasional note true and sweet as a mate-call stirred that dark
fronting mass, she failed to sustain the spell.