von Marwitz this time. It's quite on our own."

"Oh, but I would so much rather have it come through her, if we are to
be great friends," Karen returned, smiling, though reflectively. "I
think we are to be, for I felt you to be my friend from that first
moment. But it was at the concert that we met and it was Tante's
concert. So that it was not quite on our own. I want it to be through
Tante," she went on, "because it pleases me very much to think that we
may be great friends, and my happy things have come to me through Tante,
always."

CHAPTER X

He came next day and every day. They were favoured with the rarely given
gift of a perfect spring. They walked along the cliffs and headlands.
They sat and talked in the garden. He took her with Mrs. Talcott for
long drives to distant parts of the coast which he and Karen would
explore, while Mrs. Talcott in the car sat, with apparently interminable
patience, waiting for them.

Karen played to him in the morning-room; and this was a new revelation
of her. She was not a finished performer and her music was limited by
her incapacity; but she had the gift for imparting, with transparent
sincerity and unfailing sensitiveness, the very heart of what she
played. There were Arias from Schubert Sonatas, and Bach Preludes, and
loving little pieces of Schumann, that Gregory thought he had never
heard so beautifully played before. Everything they had to say was said,
though, it might be, said very softly. He told her that he cared more
for her music than for any he had listened to, and Karen laughed, not at
all taking him seriously. "But you do care for music, though you are no
musician," she said. "I like to play to you; and to someone who does not
care it is impossible."

Her acceptances of their bond might give ground for all hope or for
none. As for himself there had been, from the moment of seeing her
again, of knowing in her presence that fear and that delight, no further
doubt as to his own state and its finality. Yet his first perplexities
lingered and could at moments become painful.

He felt the beloved creature to be at once inappropriate and inevitable.
With all that was deepest and most instinctive in him her nature chimed;
the surfaces, the prejudices, the principles of his life she
contradicted and confused. She talked to him a great deal, in answer to
his questions, about her past life, and what she told him was often
disconcerting. The protective tendernes