hurch."

Secrecy has this disadvantage: we lose the sense of proportion; we
cannot tell whether our secret is important or not. Were Lucy and her
cousin closeted with a great thing which would destroy Cecil's life if
he discovered it, or with a little thing which he would laugh at? Miss
Bartlett suggested the former. Perhaps she was right. It had become a
great thing now. Left to herself, Lucy would have told her mother
and her lover ingenuously, and it would have remained a little thing.
"Emerson, not Harris"; it was only that a few weeks ago. She tried to
tell Cecil even now when they were laughing about some beautiful
lady who had smitten his heart at school. But her body behaved so
ridiculously that she stopped.

She and her secret stayed ten days longer in the deserted Metropolis
visiting the scenes they were to know so well later on. It did her no
harm, Cecil thought, to learn the framework of society, while society
itself was absent on the golf-links or the moors. The weather was cool,
and it did her no harm. In spite of the season, Mrs. Vyse managed to
scrape together a dinner-party consisting entirely of the grandchildren
of famous people. The food was poor, but the talk had a witty weariness
that impressed the girl. One was tired of everything, it seemed. One
launched into enthusiasms only to collapse gracefully, and pick oneself
up amid sympathetic laughter. In this atmosphere the Pension Bertolini
and Windy Corner appeared equally crude, and Lucy saw that her London
career would estrange her a little from all that she had loved in the
past.

The grandchildren asked her to play the piano.

She played Schumann. "Now some Beethoven" called Cecil, when the
querulous beauty of the music had died. She shook her head and played
Schumann again. The melody rose, unprofitably magical. It broke; it
was resumed broken, not marching once from the cradle to the grave. The
sadness of the incomplete--the sadness that is often Life, but should
never be Art--throbbed in its disjected phrases, and made the nerves of
the audience throb. Not thus had she played on the little draped piano
at the Bertolini, and "Too much Schumann" was not the remark that Mr.
Beebe had passed to himself when she returned.

When the guests were gone, and Lucy had gone to bed, Mrs. Vyse paced
up and down the drawing-room, discussing her little party with her son.
Mrs. Vyse was a nice woman, but her personality, like many another's,
had been s