able at Eaton, his eyes met hers; reassured, she
rose at once; the three rose with her and stood while she went out.
She went upstairs and looked in upon her father; he wanted nothing, and
after a conversation with him as short as she could make it, she came
down again. No further disagreement between the two men, apparently,
had happened after she left the table. Avery now was not visible.
Eaton and Blatchford were in the music-room; as she went to them, she
saw that Eaton had some sheets of music in his hand. So now, with a
repugnance against her father's orders which she had never felt before,
she began to carry out the instructions her father had given her.

"You play, Mr. Eaton?" she asked.

"I'm afraid not," he smiled.

"Really don't you?"

"Only drum a little sometimes, Miss Santoine. Won't you play? Please
do."

She saw that they were songs which he had been examining. "Oh, you
sing!"

He could not effectively deny it. She sat down at her piano and ran
over the songs and selections from the new opera. He followed her with
the delight of a music-lover long away from an instrument. He sang
with her a couple of the songs; he had a good, unassuming tone. And as
she went through the music, she noticed that he was familiar with
almost everything she had liked which had been written or was current
up to five years before; all later music was strange to him. To this
extent he had been of her world, plainly, up to five years before; then
he had gone out of it.

She realized this only as something which she was to report to her
father; yet she felt a keener, more personal interest in it than that.
Harriet Santoine knew enough of the world to know that few men break
completely all social connections without some link of either fact or
memory still holding them, and that this link most often is a woman.
So now, instinctively, she found, she was selecting among the music on
the racks arias of lost, disappointed or unhappy love. But she saw
that Eaton's interest in these songs appeared no different from his
interest in others; it was, so far as she could tell, for their music
he cared for them--not because they recalled to him any personal
recollection. So far as her music could assure her, then, there
was--and had been--no woman in Eaton's life whose memory made poignant
his break with his world.

Presently she desisted and turned to other sorts of music. Toward ten
o'clock, after she had stopped pla