of perversity, and even with a clear vision of
bad consequences.

"You have lost your head," he relieved himself by saying, as he looked
down at her.

"I wish you would go and get me some tea."

"You say that only to embarrass me." He had hardly spoken when a great
sound of applause, the clapping of many hands, and the cry from fifty
throats of "Brava, brava!" floated in and died away. All Ransom's pulses
throbbed, he flung his scruples to the winds, and after remarking to
Mrs. Luna--still with all due ceremony--that he feared he must resign
himself to forfeiting her good opinion, turned his back upon her and
strode away to the open door of the music-room. "Well, I have never been
so insulted!" he heard her exclaim, with exceeding sharpness, as he left
her; and, glancing back at her, as he took up his position, he saw her
still seated on her sofa--alone in the lamp-lit desert--with her eyes
making, across the empty space, little vindictive points. Well, she
could come where he was, if she wanted him so much; he would support her
on an ottoman, and make it easy for her to see. But Mrs. Luna was
uncompromising; he became aware, after a minute, that she had withdrawn,
majestically, from the place, and he did not see her again that evening.

XXVIII

He could command the music-room very well from where he stood, behind a
thick outer fringe of intently listening men. Verena Tarrant was erect
on her little platform, dressed in white, with flowers in her bosom. The
red cloth beneath her feet looked rich in the light of lamps placed on
high pedestals on either side of the stage; it gave her figure a setting
of colour which made it more pure and salient. She moved freely in her
exposed isolation, yet with great sobriety of gesture; there was no
table in front of her, and she had no notes in her hand, but stood there
like an actress before the footlights, or a singer spinning vocal sounds
to a silver thread. There was such a risk that a slim provincial girl,
pretending to fascinate a couple of hundred _blase_ New Yorkers by
simply giving them her ideas, would fail of her effect, that at the end
of a few moments Basil Ransom became aware that he was watching her in
very much the same excited way as if she had been performing, high above
his head, on the trapeze. Yet, as one listened, it was impossible not to
perceive that she was in perfect possession of her faculties, her
subject, her audience; and he remembered the