ally
fresh.

She finished her first song and retreated to her chair on the platform,
wishing that there had been a trap-door through which she might have
escaped that barrage of human sight.

Then her glance caught the elderly man with the great reputation in the
music world. He had not yet fled. He was making notes on a scrap of
paper and his keenly alert, finely chiselled face wore the expression of
unmistakable interest. The singer glanced at the white-haired lady--the
great Mrs. Ariton--and she read "well-done, my child," in a smile of
moist eyes.

She could not know that there was a direct simplicity of pathos and
artless humour in her ballads, borne on a bird-like sweetness of voice,
to the hearts of these people. She could not know that she was bringing
to the touch of their sympathy phrases and forms that had seemed as
remote and unreal as lines from Chaucer and Shakespeare.

Yet, because it was all so new and strange, the air seemed heavy to her
with a terrifying formality, as the incense laden atmosphere of a
cathedral might have been. So she looked, as she rose to sing again, for
the comforting presence of some face that might reassure her with a
kin-ship of human simplicity.

Then she saw slip quietly through the entrance door, and drop into a
seat near the critic, a young woman who was unaccompanied and who, at
first glance, seemed to carry in her fine eyes the burthen of habitual
weariness.

These eyes were deeply violet and though sadness haunted them and
bespoke ghosts that stirred uneasily and often back in their depths they
still held the hint of fires that had flashed, once, into gay and
spontaneous whimseys. The singer had a momentary sense of looking at a
face made for gracious and merry expressions, but drawn into the short
and desperate outlook of one who has fallen into deep and angry waters,
and who can see nothing ahead beyond the struggle to keep afloat.

The newcomer was tall and slender, even thin, but there was still an
intrinsic gallantry about the swing of her shoulders that made one think
of invincible qualities, though the plain severity of her clothing
brought into that contrasting company the undeniable assertion of
poverty.

The singer finished her ballad and once again went back to her chair.
This time with a diminished diffidence. She was thinking about the other
young woman at the back who looked poor and sick and who, in spite of
these things, gave her an indescribable