n,
had a strange effect upon her. She felt as if she recovered clear
consciousness after an anaesthetic. She struck another chord. What did
he want? The concert--that song. Her fingers found the prelude, her lips
the poetry, her voice the music. And then suddenly her heart found
the meaning, more than the meaning, the eternal meanings of the things
unutterable, the things that lie beyond the world in the deep souls of
the women who are the saviours of men.

When she had finished she went to the window. He was still standing in
the boat and looking up, with the whiteness of the mist about him.

"When you sing I can see those stars," he said. "Do you understand?"

She bent down.

"I don't know--I don't think I understand anything," she whispered.
"But--I'll try--I'll try to live."

Her voice was so faint, such an inward voice, that it seemed impossible
he could have heard it. But he struck the oars at once into the water
and sent the boat out into the shadows of the night.

And she stood there looking into the white silence, which was broken
only by the faint voices of the fishermen's bells, and said to herself
again and again, like a wondering child:

"There must be a God, there must be; a God who cares!"

EPILOGUE

IN London during the ensuing winter people warmly discussed, and many of
them warmly condemned, a certain Italian episode, in which a woman and
a man, once well-known and, in their very different ways, widely popular
in Society, were the actors.

In the deep autumn Sir Donald Ulford had died rather suddenly, and it
was found in his will that he had left his newly-acquired property, Casa
Felice, to Lady Holme, who--as everybody had long ago discovered--was
already living there in strict retirement, while her husband was amusing
himself in various Continental towns. This legacy was considered by a
great number of persons to be "a very strange one;" but it was not this
which caused the gossip now flitting from boudoir to boudoir and from
club to club.

It had become known that Rupert Carey, whose unfortunate vice had been
common talk ever since the Arkell House ball, was a perpetual visitor to
Casa Felice, and presently it was whispered that he was actually living
there with Lady Holme, and that Lord Holme was going to apply to the
Courts for a divorce. Thereupon many successful ladies began to wag
bitter tongues. It seemed to be generally agreed that the affair was
rendered peculiarly disgrace