t is rather overwhelming," she said; "a conjunction like
that. I mean, that it should have been she who brought me here. But
really, unless one accepts all the traditional motives and explanations
that one finds in books, it shouldn't be surprising that she should
undertake a friendly service for some one else she saw was fond of you,
too. Not when one considers the wonderful person she is."

If his sheer adoration of her were enough to save her then she was safe,
whatever the peril. But he doubted if it would be enough.

"Jennie and I were lovers once," he said. "But that came to an end for
both of us a good while ago. Two or three years. And the last time she
came to this room--one day in April it was--I told her about you and
about _The Dumb Princess_." He laid his hand upon the stack of
manuscript. "This. I had come home from that night at your father's house
when you and I heard that song together, with my head full of it. I went
nearly mad fighting it out of my head while I tried to make over that
other opera for Paula."

"_The Dumb Princess_...?"

He nodded. "You see you hardly spoke that night, only at the end to say
we mustn't talk. So I came away thinking of some one under a spell. A
princess, the fairy sort of princess who could not speak until her true
lover came to her. But instead of that I tried to go on working at that
Belgian horror and stuck at it until it was unendurable. And then, when I
came to the house to tell Paula so, it was you who came to me again, the
first time since that night."

There had come a faintly visible color into her cheeks and once more she
smiled, reflectively. "That's what you meant then," she mused. "I
couldn't make it out. You said just before you went away, 'That's why it
was so incredible when you came down the stairs instead.'"

She had remembered that!

"I ran away," he confessed, "the moment I had said it, for fear of
betraying myself. And I went to work on _The Dumb Princess_ that day."

"You've done all that, a whole opera, since the fourteenth of May?"

"I worked on it," he said, "until I had to stop for the little vacation
that--that ended at Hickory Hill. And I came straight back to it from
there. I've been working at it all the time since. Now, except for the
scoring in the second part of the third act, it's finished. I thought it
was the thing I wanted more than anything else in the world. Just to get
it written down on paper, the thing which that moment