disappointment. "So you haven't
time to hear me play?" he asked wistfully.

"Not now--there's Aunt Angela's dinner to be seen to. If Mr. Bleeker
comes with Aunt Sophy you can play to him. He likes it."

"But he always goes to sleep, Laura. He doesn't listen--and besides he
snores so that I can't enjoy my own music."

"That's because he'd rather snore than do anything else. I wouldn't let
that worry me an instant. He goes to sleep at the opera."

She went out, and after giving a few careful instructions to a servant
in the dining-room, ascended the staircase to the large square room in
the left wing where Angela remained a wilful prisoner. As she opened the
door she entered into a mist of dim candle light, by which her aunt was
pacing restlessly up and down the length of the apartment.

To pass from the breathless energy of modern New York into this quiet
conventual atmosphere was like crossing by a single step the division
between two opposing civilisations. Even the gas light, which Angela
could not endure, was banished from her eyes, and she lived always in a
faint, softened twilight not unlike that of some meditative Old-World
cloisters. The small iron bed, the colourless religious prints, the pale
drab walls and the floor covered only by a chill white matting, all
emphasised the singular impression of an expiation that had become as
pitiless as an obsession of insanity. On a small table by a couch, which
was drawn up before a window overlooking the park, there was a row of
little devotional books, all bound neatly in black leather, but beyond
this the room was empty of any consolation for mind or body. Only the
woman herself, with her accusing face and her carelessly arranged
snow-white hair, held and quickened the imagination in spite of her
suggestion of bitter brooding and unbalanced reason. Her eyes looking
wildly out of her pallid face were still the beautiful, fawn-like eyes
of the girl of twenty, and one felt in watching her that the old tragic
shock had paralysed in them the terrible expression of that one moment
until they wore forever the indignant and wounded look with which she
had met the blow that destroyed her youth.

"Dear," said Laura, entering softly as she might have entered a death
chamber. "You will see Aunt Rosa and Aunt Sophy, will you not?"

Angela did not stop in her nervous walk, but when she reached the end of
the long room she made a quick, feverish gesture, raising her hands to
pu