e. Like everybody else she was clapping
frantically, like everybody, that is, except Gregory Jardine; for
Gregory, his elbow in his hand, his fingers still neatly twisting the
end of his moustache, continued to observe the young girl in the front
row, whose face, illuminated and irradiated, was upturned to the figure
now mounting to the platform.

CHAPTER II

The hush that had fallen was like the hush that falls on Alpine watchers
in the moment before sunrise, and, with the great musician's slow
emerging from below, it was as if the sun had risen.

She came, with her indolent step, the thunder of hands and voices
greeting her; and those who gazed at her from the platform saw the
pearl-wreathed hair and opulent white shoulders, and those who gazed at
her from beneath saw the strange and musing face. Then she stood before
them and her dark eyes dwelt, impassive and melancholy, upon the sea of
faces, tumultuous and blurred with clapping hands. The sound was like
the roaring of the sea and she stood as a goddess might have stood at
the brink of the ocean, indifferent and unaware, absorbed in dreams of
ancient sorrow. The ovation was so prolonged and she stood there for so
long--hardly less the indifferent goddess because, from time to time,
she bowed her own famous bow, stately, old-fashioned, formally and
sublimely submissive,--that every eye in the great audience could feast
upon her in a rapturous assurance of leisure.

She was a woman of forty-eight, of an ample though still beautiful
figure. Her flowing dress of white brocade made no attempt to compress,
to sustain or to attenuate. No one could say that a woman who stood as
she did, with the port of a goddess--the small head majestically poised
over such shoulders and such a breast--was getting fat; yet no one could
deny that there was redundancy. She was not redundant as other women
were; she was not elegant as other women were; she seemed in nothing
like others. Her dress was strange; it had folds and amplitudes and dim
disks of silver broideries at breast and knee that made it like the
dress of some Venetian lady, drawn at random from an ancestral marriage
coffer and put on dreamily with no thought of aptness. Her hair was
strange; no other woman's hair was massed and folded as was hers, hair
dark as night and intertwined and looped with twisted strands of pearl
and diamond. Her face was strange, that crowning face, known to all the
world. Disparate raci