compensate, to make it up to him.

She had observed drastically to herself that it was her eighteenth year
he awoke in her--those hard years she had spent in turning gowns and
placating tradesmen, and which she had never had time to live. After
all, she reflected, it was better to allow one's self a little youth--to
dance a little at the carnival and to live these things when they are
natural and lovely, not to have them coming back on one and demanding
arrears when they are humiliating and impossible. She went over tonight
all the catalogue of her self-deprivations; recalled how, in the light
of her father's example, she had even refused to humor her innocent
taste for improvising at the piano; how, when she began to teach, after
her mother's death, she had struck out one little indulgence after
another, reducing her life to a relentless routine, unvarying as
clockwork. It seemed to her that ever since d'Esquerre first came into
the house she had been haunted by an imploring little girlish ghost that
followed her about, wringing its hands and entreating for an hour of
life.

The storm had held off unconscionably long; the air within the lodge was
stifling, and without the garden waited, breathless. Everything seemed
pervaded by a poignant distress; the hush of feverish, intolerable
expectation. The still earth, the heavy flowers, even the growing
darkness, breathed the exhaustion of protracted waiting. Caroline felt
that she ought to go; that it was wrong to stay; that the hour and the
place were as treacherous as her own reflections. She rose and began to
pace the floor, stepping softly, as though in fear of awakening someone,
her figure, in its thin drapery, diaphanously vague and white. Still
unable to shake off the obsession of the intense stillness, she sat down
at the piano and began to run over the first act of the _Walkure_, the
last of his roles they had practiced together; playing listlessly and
absently at first, but with gradually increasing seriousness. Perhaps it
was the still heat of the summer night, perhaps it was the heavy odors
from the garden that came in through the open windows; but as she played
there grew and grew the feeling that he was there, beside her, standing
in his accustomed place. In the duet at the end of the first act she
heard him clearly: _"Thou art the Spring for which I sighed in Winter's
cold embraces."_ Once as he sang it, he had put his arm about her,
his one hand under her h