of you," she cried. "I don't believe you--would have
known I was here unless you had caught eight of me."

"I should have known it," he said.

"How?"

"Because I heard you playing. I am sure it was you playing."

"Yes, it was I," she answered simply, "but I did not know that--you
heard. Where were you?

"I suppose," he replied, "a sane witness would have testified that I
was in the street--one of those partial and material truths which are so
misleading."

She laughed again, joyously.

"Seriously, why did you come down here?" she insisted. "I am not so
absorbed in Humphrey's career that I cannot take an interest in yours.
In fact, yours interests me more, because it is more mysterious.
Humphrey's," she added, laughing, "is charted from day to day, and
announced in bulletins. He is more generous to his friends than--you."

"I have nothing to chart," said Austen, "except such pilgrimages as
this,--and these, after all, are unchartable. Your friend, Mr. Crewe,
on the other hand, is well away on his voyage after the Golden Fleece. I
hope he is provided with a Lynceus."

She was silent for a long time, but he was feverishly conscious of her
gaze upon him, and did not dare to turn his eyes to hers. The look in
them he beheld without the aid of physical vision, and in that look was
the world-old riddle of her sex typified in the image on the African
desert, which Napoleon had tried to read, and failed. And while wisdom
was in the look, there was in it likewise the eternal questioning of a
fate quite as inscrutable, against which wisdom would avail nothing.
It was that look which, for Austen, revealed in her in their infinite
variety all women who had lived; those who could resist, and those
who could yield, and yielding all, bestow a gift which left them still
priceless; those to whom sorrow might bring sadness, and knowledge
mourning, and yet could rob them of no jot of sweetness. And knowing
this, he knew that to gain her now (could such a high prize be gained!)
would be to lose her. If he were anything to her (realize it or not as
she might), it was because he found strength to resist this greatest
temptation of his life. Yield, and his guerdon was lost, and he would be
Austen Vane no longer--yield, and his right to act, which would make him
of value in her eyes as well as in his own, was gone forever.

Well he knew what the question in her eyes meant or something of what
it meant, so inexplicably is the soul of