ation which delighted Mrs.
Mansfield. Yet she realized that Heath was a man who might be won away
from that which was best in him, from that which he almost sternly clung
to and cherished. And one day he made her aware that he knew this.

They went to a concert together at Queen's Hall, and sat in the gallery,
in seats which Heath habitually frequented when the music given was
orchestral, when he wished to see as little as possible and to hear
perfectly. He enjoyed hearing a fine orchestra without watching the
conductor, whose necessary gestures, sometimes not free from an element
of the grotesque, hindered the sweet toil of his imagination, held him
back from worlds he desired to enter.

Between the two parts of the not long concert there was a pause. During
it Mrs. Mansfield and Claude left their seats and strolled about in the
corridor, talking. They were both of them heated by music and ready for
mental intimacy. But they did not discuss the works they had just heard.
Combinations of melody and harmony turned them toward life and humanity.
The voices of the great orchestral family called them toward the dim
avenues where in the shadows destiny wanders. Some music enlarges the
borders, sets us free in regions whose confines we cannot perceive. They
spoke of aims, of ideals, of goals which are very far off.

"Fine music gives me the conception of great distances," Mrs. Mansfield
said presently. "It makes me feel that the soul is born for travel."

Heath stood still.

"The winding white road over the hills that loses itself in the
vagueness which, in a picture, only some shade of blue can suggest. The
road! The road!"

He stood leaning against the wall. As she stood by him Mrs. Mansfield
felt strangely, almost cruelly, young. It was as if student days had
come for them both. She could hardly believe that her hair was
snow-white, and that Charmian had been going to parties for nearly four
years.

"The worst of it is," Claude continued, "that it is so hard sometimes
not to wander from it."

"It seems to me you never wander."

"Because I know that, if I did, I should probably never come back to the
road. What you perhaps consider my strength takes its rise, I believe,
in my knowledge of my weakness. Things that are right for others aren't
right for me."

No one was near them. The music seemed to have abolished for the moment
the difference in age between them. Claude spoke to her as he had seldom
spoken to he