rred before her, "I'm not sorry!" He had needed his lesson; but she
had to bear the recollection of how white his face went when he received
it. Her affront had put about him a strange loneliness: the one figure
with the stilled crowd staring; it had made a picture from which her
mind's eye had been unable to escape, danced she never so hard and late.
Unconsciously, Robert Carewe's daughter had avenged the other figure
which had stood in lonely humiliation before the staring eyes.

"I'm not sorry!" Ah, did they think it was in her to hurt any living
thing in the world? The book dropped from her lap, and she bowed her
head upon her hands. "I'm not sorry! "--and tears upon the small lace
gauntlets!

She saw them, and with an incoherent exclamation, half self-pitying,
half impatient, ran out to the stars above her garden.

She was there for perhaps half an hour, and just before she returned to
the house she did a singular thing.

Standing where all was clear to the sky, where she had stood after her
talk with the Incroyable, when he had bid her look to the stars, she
raised her arms to them again, her face, pale with a great tenderness,
uplifted.

"You, you, you!" she whispered. "I love you!"

And yet it was to nothing definite, to no man, nor outline of a man,
to no phantom nor dream-lover, that she spoke; neither to him she had
affronted, nor to him who had bidden her look to the stars. Nor was it
to the stars themselves.

She returned slowly and thoughtfully to the house, wondering what she
had meant.

CHAPTER XI. A Voice in a Garden

Crailey came home the next day with a new poem, but no fish. He lounged
up the stairs, late in the afternoon, humming cheerfully to himself,
and, dropping his rod in a corner of Tom's office, laid the poem on
the desk before his partner, produced a large, newly-replenished flask,
opened it, stretched himself comfortably upon a capacious horse-hair
sofa, drank a deep draught, chuckled softly, and requested Mr. Vanrevel
to set the rhymes to music immediately.

"Try it on your instrument," he said. "It's a simple verse about nothing
but stars, and you can work it out in twenty minutes with the guitar."

"It is broken," said Tom, not looking up from his work.

"Broken! When?"

"Last night."

"Who broke it?"

"It fell from the table in my room."

"How? Easily mended, isn't it?"

"I think I shall not play it soon again."

Crailey swung his long legs off the sofa and a