of them at any rate, probably spoke the exact truth.

Lady Holme herself, while she sang her second song, really felt this
sensation--that it was her swan song. If once we touch perfection we
feel the black everlasting curtain being drawn round us. We have
done what we were meant to do and can do no more. Let the race of men
continue. Our course is run out. To strive beyond the goal is to offer
oneself up to the derision of the gods. In her song, Lady Holme felt
that suddenly, and with great ease, she touched the perfection that it
was possible for her to reach. She felt that, and she saw what she had
done--in the eyes of Lady Cardington that wept, in Sir Donald's eyes,
which had become young as the eyes of Spring, and in the eyes of that
poor prisoner who was the real Rupert Carey. When she sang the first
refrain she knew.

"Torna in fior di giovinezza
Isaotta Blanzesmano,
Dice: Tutto al mondo e vano:
Nell'amore ogni dolcezza."

She understood while she sang--she had never understood before, nor
could conceive why she understood now--what love had been to the world,
was being, would be so long as there was a world. The sweetness of love
did not merely present itself to her imagination, but penetrated her
soul. And that penetration, while it carried with it and infused through
her whole being a delicate radiance, that was as the radiance of
light in the midst of surrounding blackness--beams of the moon in
a forest--carried with it also into her heart a frightful sense of
individual isolation, of having missed the figure of Truth in the
jostling crowd of shams.

Fritz stood there against the wall. Yes--Fritz. And he was savagely
rejoicing in the effect she was making upon the audience, because he
thought, hoped, that it would lessen the triumph of the woman who was
punishing him.

She had missed the figure of Truth. That was very certain. And as she
sang the refrain for the last time she seemed to herself to be searching
for the form that must surely be very wonderful, searching for it in the
many eyes that were fixed upon her. She looked at Sir Donald:

"Dice: Tutto al mondo e vano:"

She looked at Rupert Carey:

"Nell'amore ogni dolcezza."

She still looked at Carey, and the hideous wreckage of the flesh was no
longer visible to her. She saw only his burning eyes.

Directly she had finished singing she asked for her motor cloak. While
they were fetching it she had to go