to
intoxicate himself on Sunday with champagne in the society of Miss
Poppy Grace. Its sovereignty cancelled the priority of the more
trivial and the grosser claim. His word to Miss Harden was one of
those fine immortal things that can only be redeemed at the cost of
the actual. To redeem it he was prepared for sacrifice, even the
sacrifice of the great three days.

He worked late that night and she told him of a short cut to the town
by the river path at the bottom of the garden. Half-way to the river
he stopped and looked back. The beech tree dreamed, silent on a slope
of glimmering lawn. The house loomed in the background, a grey mass
with blurred outlines. From a window open in the east wing he could
hear the sound of a piano.

He stood still and listened. All around was the tender, indescribable
Devonshire night; it hung about him with warm scented breath; he felt
its heart beat in the innumerable pulses of the stars. Behind the blue
transparent darkness the music throbbed like a dawn; it swayed and
sank, piano, pianissimo, and streamed out again into the night,
dividing the darkness. It flowed on in a tumult, a tremendous tumult,
rhythmic and controlled. What was she playing? If he stayed till
midnight he must hear it through. Night sheltered him, and he drew
nearer lest he should lose a note. He stretched himself on the lawn,
and, with his head on his arms, he lay under the beech-tree, under the
stars, dreaming, while Lucia Harden played to him the Sonata
Appassionata.

It was good to be there; but he did not know, and the music did not
tell him why he was there and what he was there for.

And yet it was the Sonata Appassionata.

CHAPTER XVIII

It was the afternoon of Saturday the fourth that Mr. Rickman, looking
up from his table, saw a brilliant apparition coming across the lawn.
He dreaded afternoon callers, he dreaded the post, he dreaded every
person and every thing which reminded him that Lucia Harden had a life
that he knew not and that knew not him.

"Lucia--Lucia!" Mr. Rickman looked up and saw the brilliant apparition
standing in the south window. "Lu-chee-a!--" it pleaded. "You can't
say you're out when I can see perfectly well that you're in."

"Go away Kitty, I'm busy."

"You've no business to be busy at five o'clock in the afternoon."

Miss Kitty Palliser's body was outside the window, but her head,
crowned with a marvellous double-peaked hat of Parma violets, was
already with