Hawksley's recuperative powers promised well for his future. By
the time coffee was served his head had cleared and his legs had resumed
their normal functions of support.

"I was so infernally bored!"

"And now?" asked Kitty, recklessly.

"Fancy asking me that!"

"Do you realize that all this is dreadfully improper?"

"Oh, I say, now! Where's the harm? If ever there was a young woman
capable of taking care of herself--"

"That isn't it. It's just being here alone with you."

"But you are not alone with me!"

"Kuroki?" Kitty shrugged.

"No. At my side of the table is Stefani Gregor; at yours the man who has
befriended me."

"Thank you for that. I don't know of anything nicer you could say. But
the outside world would see neither of our friends. I did not come here
to see you."

"No need of telling me that."

"I had a problem--a very difficult one--to solve; and I believed that I
might solve it if I came to these rooms. I had quite forgotten you."

Instantly, upon receiving this blunt explanation, he determined that she
should never cease to remember him after this night. His vanity was not
touched; it was something far more elusive. It was perhaps a recurrence
of that inexplicable desire to hurt. Somehow he sensed the flexible
steel behind which lay the soul of this baffling girl. He would
presently find a chink in the armour with that old Amati.

Blows on the head have few surgical comparisons. That which kills one
man only temporarily stuns another. One man loses his identity; another
escapes with all his faculties and suffers but trifling inconvenience.
In Hawksley's case the blow had probably restricted some current
of thought, and that which would have flowed normally now shot out
obliquely, perversely. It might be that the natural perverseness of his
blood, unchecked by the noble influence of Stefani Gregor and liberated
by the blow, governed his thoughts in relation to Kitty. The subjugation
of women, the old cynical warfare of sex--the dominant business of his
rich and idle forbears, the business that had made Boris Karlov a deadly
and implacable enemy--became paramount in his disordered brain.

She had forgotten him! Very well. He would stir the soul of her, play
with it, lift it to the stars and dash it down--if she had a soul.
Beautiful, natural, alone. He became all Latin under the pressure of
this idea.

"I will play for you," he said, quietly.

"Please! And then I'll go home where I