perhaps, a trifle disappointed, considering that he was a lover) to note
that Lady Mary was regarding Julius with a silent, wide-eyed
fascination. They convoyed Julius to Nora, and then withdrew, leaving
them together.

There were several fresh arrivals and new introductions to Lady Mary.
These, Lefevre observed, she went through half-absently, still turning
her eyes on Julius in the intervals with open and intense interest.

"Well," said Lefevre at length, smiling in spite of a twinge of
jealousy, "what do you think, now you have seen him, of the fascinating
Julius?"

She gave him no answering smile, but replied as if she painfully
withdrew herself from abstraction,--"I--I don't know. He is very
interesting and very strange. I--I can't make him out. I don't know."

Then Lefevre turned his eyes on Julius, and became aware of something
strained in the relations of his sister and his friend. He could not
forbear to look, and as he continued looking he instinctively felt that
a passionate scene was being silently enacted between them. They sat
markedly apart. Nora's bosom heaved with suppressed emotion, and her
look, when raised to Julius, plied him with appeal or reproach--Lefevre
could not determine which. The doctor's interest almost drew him over to
them, when Lady Lefevre appeared and said to Julius--

"Do go to the piano, Julius, and wake us up."

Nora put out her hand with a gesture which plainly meant, "Don't!...
Don't leave me!"

But Julius rose, and as he turned (the doctor noted) he bent an
inscrutable look of pain on Nora. He sat down at the piano and struck a
wild, sad chord. Instantly it became as if the people in the room were
the instrument upon which he played,--as if the throbbing human hearts
around him were directly connected by invisible strings with the ivory
keys that pulsed beneath his fingers. What was the music he played no
one knew, no one cared, no one inquired: each individual person was held
and played upon, and was allowed no pause for reflection or criticism.
The music carried all away as on the flood of time, showing them, on one
hand, sunshine and beauty and joy, and all the pride of life; and on the
other, darkness and cruelty, despair, and defiance, and death. It might
have been, on the one hand, the music with which Orpheus tamed the
beasts; and on the other, that which AEschylus arranged to accompany the
last act of his tragedy of "Prometheus Bound." There was, however, no
cle