ired!

His face took on the look it usually wore while he played, and solemnly
and reverently he stood, his eyes half shut, him mouth set in noble
lines. He had forgotten Brigit, but sub-consciously he was playing for
her, and she knew it, and appreciated the tribute, which was all the
greater because offered without intent.

She watched him unceasingly, and gradually, as the music went on, her
heart sank, and she realised that she had done a most unworthy thing.
The feeling she had had that last evening at home came back to her, the
feeling that he was a child in horrible danger. Only this time it was
she who had deliberately led him into the danger. And his
unconsciousness of his peril hurt her so, that as he stopped playing she
could have cried to him to go away, to run to the ends of the earth,
where she could not reach him.

"You liked it?" he asked gently, and the question seemed so
pathetically inadequate, and so plainly emphasised the innocence of his
mind, that tears came to her eyes.

"Yes," she said in a very quiet voice, "thank you, dear papa." But this
time there was no malice in the term, and when she said good-night to
him at the motor door, it was simply and filially. Then she turned to
Theo, and he, looking hastily up and down the quiet street, put his head
in at the window and kissed her.

CHAPTER FIVE

And that was the beginning of a most extraordinary phase of Brigit
Mead's life.

For the next four months she saw Joyselle almost daily. She never
broached the subject of her engagement being broken, its permanence was
taken for granted by everyone, and Tommy's indefinitely prolonged visit
to Golden Square would, if anything more than the fact of her engagement
had been necessary, have explained her constant presence there.

Once Theo had urged her to set their wedding-day, but she had put him
off and he had never again opened the question. That the young man was
not, could not possibly be, perfectly satisfied with the state of
affairs, she knew very well, but that, she told herself, she could not
help.

She lived on from day to day, more simply and with less self-analysis,
in spite of her curious position, than ever before in her life, for the
inevitable day of reckoning seemed to be the affair of the Brigit of the
future, whereas the Brigit of each day was concerned only with those
particular twenty-four hours. It was enough to live in close
companionship with the man she loved, an