Martin was seated alone with Stella in the drawing-room of her mother’s house, eating muffins, thoughtfully but rather rapidly, while she poured out tea.

“Fancy,” he said, “it is only a week ago since—since the party at Lady Sunningdale’s, since I knew.”

“Knew what?” asked Stella, quite unnecessarily.

“Ah, I only know one thing now. I think I have forgotten everything else.”

“Say it then,” said she.

“That I love you? Are you not tired of hearing me say that yet?”

She smiled, brought him his tea, and sat on the arm of his chair.

“I can’t believe that a woman can ever be tired of hearing that, if the right man says it. Oh, Martin, how lucky it was you, and that it was I!”

Martin put his teacup down, having drunk with amazing speed.

“Why, who else could it have been?” he said; “how could it have been otherwise?”

“No, I suppose not. Yet you didn’t know, as you call it, for a long time. Supposing you had gone on not knowing?”

He leaned back in his chair looking at her, his black eyes shining in the firelight.

“And when I did know, I frightened you,” he said.{296}

“Yes, a little. But I loved it. You see, I had never seen you really in earnest before, except when you were playing. You always put everything you had or were into that.”

“I know. That is what Karl Rusoff told me. He told me to experience all I could, because it would all go to make me play. He calls it spiritual alchemy, like when you put a plant in the earth and water it, the earth and the water are somehow turned into the blossom of that plant while another plant would turn them into a different flower. In fact, darling, you are going to come out of the ends of my fingers, whereas if I were a great Greek scholar you would become iambics.”

He looked at her and his smile deepened into gravity.

“Oh, Stella, Stella,” he said, “did the world ever hold anything like you?”

She leaned back till her face was close to his and put her arm round his neck.

“Yes, yes; do that with me!” she said, “absorb me, let me become part of you. Indeed, I want no other existence at all. Do you know the Persian legend, how the lover knocked at the door of his beloved, and the beloved said, ‘Who is that?’ and he replied, ‘It is I.’ And the one inside said, ‘There is not room for two.’ Then he went away again, and came back after a year, and knocked again. And again from inside the voice said, ‘Who is that?’ But this time he said, ‘It is thou.’ So the door was opened and he went in.”

“That is beautiful,” said Martin. “But, my word, fancy being able to become music. And suppose one happened to become a song by Gounod. Only that isn’t music,” he added.{297}

Stella felt somehow suddenly chilled.

“Promise me I shan’t become a song by Gounod,” she said.

Martin looked at her in silence a moment. She had risen rather abruptly from her position and was again sitting upright on the arm of his chair.

“And what do I become?” he asked. “What do you make of me? It is thou, remember.”

Something that for the last three days had hung mist-like in Stella’s mind suddenly congealed, crystallised, became definite.

“I don’t want you to become anything,” she said. “But I want you to Be. I want you to be entirely yourself. I want you to get below your own surface, to dive into yourself, to find pearls. And then to let me wear them.”

“You mean I am shallow?”

“No, dear, I mean nothing of the kind. But, oh, Martin, don’t misunderstand me. All you have got from life, all you have gained, all you are you treat as fuel—you have said it—to burn in the furnace of your one passion—music.”

Martin admitted this with a reservation.

“That was true,” he said, “till just a week ago.”

Stella rose from her place; sitting close to him, like that, she could not say what she meant to say. Personal magnetism, her love for that beautiful face, prevented her. So she went to the hearth-rug, under pretence of poking the fire, and stood there with her back to it, facing him. Then she spoke more quickly, with a certain vibration in her voice.

“And this last week,” she said, “a new and wonderful piece of music was discovered by you. Yes, I{298} put myself as high as that. But am I more than that? Am I really?”

Martin’s forehead wrinkled slightly. Had it not been Stella who asked him this he would have said the question was unreasonable. But before he could reply she went on.

“Ah, dearest,” she said. “I asked you just now to absorb me, to make me you. But I will not flow out of your finger-tips. Oh, I know you only said that in jest, but in jest sometimes one strikes very near to truth. Have you thought what you are to me, and what, if I am anything, I must be to you. Something absolutely indispensable, your life, no less. Now, supposing chords and harmonies were dumb to you forever, what would be left of you? Tell me that.”

Martin’s expression grew puzzled. It was as if she asked him some preposterous riddle without answer. How could he compare the two?

“How can I tell?” he said. “I suppose I should somehow and sometime adjust myself to it, though I haven’t the slightest idea how. I can’t imagine life, consciousness, without them.”

“And if I went out of your life?” she asked, unwisely, but longing for some convincing answer.

In reply Martin got up and went close to her.

“You have often called me a fool,” he said, “and you have often called me a child. I am both when you ask me things like that. But this foolish child speaks to you, so listen. He does not know what it all means, but he loves you. He knows no other word except that. Is that not enough? If not, what is?”

Then once again the mastery of man overcame her. She wanted him so much, more than any answer to{299} her questions. The subtleties into which she had tried to draw him he brushed aside; her woman’s brain, her woman’s desire to hear him say that she was all, had spun them deftly enough, but he blundered through them somehow, like a bumblebee through a spider’s web, and came booming out on the other side. Theoretically, anyhow, if he had been a woman, they must have caught him, he must have struggled with them, felt their entanglement. As it was, she had failed. Probably he labelled her fine spinnings “silly” in his own mind. But he proceeded through them—still frowning a little.

“You ask me impossible riddles,” he said. “You might as well ask me whether you would sooner tie your mother to the stake and burn her or me. My darling, there is no sense in such things. Surely one can be simple about love, just because it is so big. I know I love you, that is enough for me. I told you that I know nothing else. That is sober truth. But I cannot weigh things in balances. And, what is more, I won’t. Now kiss me; no, properly.”

It must therefore be inferred that he got his way in this matter, for when, two minutes later, Lady Sunningdale made her untimely appearance, the two were again seated, Stella this time in the chair and Martin on the arm.

“But famishing,” she said. “Yes, tea, please, dear Stella. Martin, you monster, I haven’t seen you for days. Why I haven’t taken to drink I don’t know, over all the dreadful things that have been happening. Would you believe it,—Sahara had two puppies; but she couldn’t bear them, so she ate one and starved the other. Well, it’s all over, but nobody in the house has{300} had a wink of sleep for the last week. And so you are going to give a concert at last, Martin. I shan’t come. I hate my private property being made public.”

“But charity,” said Martin.

“My dear, I know perfectly well what charity and St. James’s Hall means. It means guinea tickets. Charity should begin at home, not at St. James’s Hall. However, I daresay you will appropriate all the proceeds. So near the Circus, too. Really, Piccadilly Circus is too fascinating. I should like to have a house in the very centre of it, with a glass gallery all round, and really see life. Yes, one more piece of muffin,—not for myself, but for Suez Canal. Suez Canal is so lonely, poor darling, without Sahara; but there is muffin quand même. Naughty! I’m sure the servants feed him. And so everybody is to be married in May. Fancy the Bear coming round like that—even Bears will turn—about Helen and Frank. Apparently, they are quite inseparable,—the Bear and Frank I mean, and tie each other’s bootlaces, and are converting each other to Christianity and Atheism respectively. Bears and buns! Frank is a bun, and the Bear has decided it is worth climbing up a pole to get him. I think it is a mistake to have said that. Besides, it is absolutely untrue. The Bear wouldn’t climb a yard to marry Helen to the Czar. How terrible Russia must be, with everything ending in ‘owsky’! I tried to flirt with the Bear myself, and had no success of any kind whatever. Dear Suez! No Sahara. The world is a desert without Sahara. But mayn’t I tempt you with a small piece of bun with sugar on the top? How depressing marriages are!”

Lady Sunningdale sighed heavily.{301}

“What is the matter?” asked Stella, sympathetically.

“I don’t know. Dearest, that Louis XVI. clock is too beautiful. I wish I were a millionaire. Yes. I think I am depressed because everything is going exactly as I planned it. There is nothing so tiresome as success. You two children sitting there, Frank and Helen, all my own ideas, and all going precisely as I wished. You are my idea, too, Martin, a figment of my brain. I invented you. And you are going precisely as I wished. Every one says nobody ever played the least like you. But the Bear is still in a rage with you, is he not? That is so English. English people are always in a rage about something, the state of the weather, or France, or their children. I never get in a rage. I have no time for that sort of thing. Stella dearest, I think it will have to be you to go down to Chartries next, and induce the Bear to be propitiated. Heavens, how dreadful it must be to have a very strong sense of duty! It must be like toast-crumbs in your bed, after you have breakfasted there, when one can’t lie comfortable for five minutes together.”

“No, I am the next,” said Martin. “I shall be staying with my uncle at Easter, and shall try to see my father then. I daresay it will do no good.”

“Do you really care?” asked Lady Sunningdale. “I really don’t see why you should. He is unreasonable. I shouldn’t worry.”

Stella turned to Martin with a certain air of expectancy.

“Yes, I do care,” he said; “I care horribly. I care every day. I hate being on bad terms with any one. I hate anger and resentment,” he added, with a little{302} quiet air of dignity, for he had not wholly liked Lady Sunningdale’s remarks.

“That was one of Nature’s most extraordinary conjuring tricks,” she said. “People talk of heredity; but put all the fathers of England in a row, and ask any one to pick out Martin’s. The better they know either of you, by so much the more will they pick out Mr. Challoner last of all!”

Martin got up.

“Ah, don’t let’s talk about it,” he said; “it is not agreeable. I wish I could laugh about it like you, but I can’t.”

Then, with a quick intuition, he turned to Stella.

“One can’t do any good by talking about it, can one?” he asked.

Something still jarred on the girl, due partly to their talk before Lady Sunningdale came in.

“You have admirable common sense,” she said.

Lady Sunningdale caught on to this with her usual quickness. She knew for certain from Stella’s tone that something had gone just a shade wrong between them.

“And you find it rather trying, do you not, dearest Stella?” she said. “Of course, Martin is the most trying person in the world; and if it wasn’t for his ten fingers he would be absolutely intolerable. He is a boy of about twelve, with dreadful streaks of common sense worthy of a man of fifty who has left all his illusions behind him. Yes, monster, that is you!”

Martin raised his eyebrows, his excellent temper slightly ruffled for the moment.

“Indeed, I didn’t recognise it,” he said.

“Dear Martin, don’t be pompous. You didn’t recognise it because it wasn’t flattering. They say we{303} women are vain, but compared to men—— Some women are vain of their appearance, it is true, and usually without sufficient cause, but all men are vain of every attribute that God has or has not endowed them with. Remember that, Stella, and if you want to lead a quiet life, lay on flattery with a spade. They are insatiable. Personally I don’t flatter Sunningdale, because I don’t in the least want a quiet life. Tranquility is so frightfully aging and makes one like an oyster.”

Martin had recovered his serenity.

“When I am dead,” he remarked, “you will be sorry for what you have said. But why this sudden attack on me?”

“When you are dead you will see how right I was. But the attack—well, chiefly because you haven’t provoked it. That is so tiresome of you. You could see I wanted to quarrel, and you wouldn’t say anything I could lay hold of. If I want to sit down, politeness ordains that you should give me a chair. If you see I want to quarrel, politeness ordains that you should give me a pretext. It is the worst possible manners not to. My nerves are all on edge. When that is the case, the only thing to do is to quiet them by being rude to other people. Dearest Stella, you look too lovely this afternoon. Why you want to throw yourself away on Martin I can’t think!”

“But you said just now it was your idea,” said Stella.

“I know it was, and a very foolish one. I never imagined you would take it seriously. Besides, you know perfectly well that whenever a thing happens that pleases me, I always say it is my own idea. My darling, did I tread on you. How foolish of you to lie{304} there. And when you are all happily settled for, what am I to do next?”

The clock struck and Martin looked up.

“Gracious, I am late,” he said. “Karl was to give me a lesson at six. You must say good-bye to me next, Lady Sunningdale.”

Stella got up, too.

“I’ll see you safely out of the house,” she said, and left the room with him. Then, having closed the door, she paused, taking hold of the lappel of his coat.

“Martin, you’re not vexed with me?” she asked.

“No; why? I thought you were vexed with me.”

“No, dear. I was vexed with myself, I think, and so I was horrid to you. But, my dearest, give me all you can of yourself. I want so much, just because it is you!”

Martin’s eyes kindled and glowed.

“It is all yours,” he said. “You know that. I wish there was more of it. And there is more since—since a week ago.”

“Then I am content,” she said, “and that means a great deal. I think I was rather jealous of pianos generally. And you forgive me? Yes?”

Lady Sunningdale, though often irrelevant from sheer irrelevancy, was also sometimes irrelevant on purpose, using preposterous conversation, as Bismarck used truth, as a valuable instrument to secure definite ends. Just now, for instance, her attack on Martin had purpose at its back, for she had seen quite distinctly that something had gone wrong between him and Stella, and had made the diversion in order to prevent the topic of friction, whatever it was, being subjected to further rubbing. Providence had lent{305} aid to her benevolent scheme, sending Martin off to his music-lesson and leaving Stella alone with her. In fact, her request to be told what she should do next needed no answer at all, for she knew quite well that what she would do next was............