ening. She could not bring herself to explain to him
now. She would do it in the morning when the air was clearer and
cooler.

As they entered the hotel, she turned into the music room, saying that
she had to practise for her part in the concert. He held out his hand
with a little formal gesture. "I wish you a big success," said he; "my
part doesn't need any practice." Then he went upstairs to pack his
trunk for the six o'clock train.

An hour later, as he passed out of the door, he heard her still at the
piano. She was playing for her own pleasure now--just to relieve the
tension of her feelings by letting them flow out on the rhythmic
current of music. It was her favourite piece, that magical _humoreske_
by Dvorak, which is like an April day, full of smiles and tears,
pleading and laughter. The clear notes came out under her exquisite
touch with a penetrating charm of airy, graceful fantasy. To the angry
boy at the door it seemed as if they were full of delicate
indifference and mockery. They expressed to him the spirit of a
girl--light, capricious, elusive, yet with a will that can resist all
appeal and evade all attack--an invincible butterfly, a thistle-down
of steel--the thing that a man wants most in all the world and yet can
not have unless she chooses. She stood for his first defeat, his great
disappointment, his discovery that life can refuse; and now she was
playing this quaint, careless, mocking music!

"She does not care," he said to himself, as he climbed into the
stage, "and I will not care. She is only a flirt. All girls are like
that." With this profound generalisation in what he called his mind,
but what was really his temper, he rode sullenly away.

He did not hear how she lingered caressingly over the last phrases of
the _humoreske_, playing them very softly, with her blond head bent
over the piano, as if she were trying to recall something. He did not
know that she put on the frock that he liked best, with the mauve
ribbons, for the concert that night. He did not see her lips quiver
and the look of pained surprise flash into her brown eyes when she
heard that he had gone without even saying good-bye.

Naturally she, thinking him a proud and foolish boy, waited for him to
come back or to write. Naturally he, having classified her as a cold
and heartless flirt, expected her to send him a letter asking him to
return. Naturally neither of these things happened. The little
bank-dividing stream of c