d. "The people she would have to live among would have
looked askance at her if they had known. There seemed no reason why they
should."

"How did it all happen?" she persisted. "Was it very beautiful, in the
beginning?" She wished she had not added that last. The words had
slipped from her before she knew.

"Very beautiful," he answered, "in the beginning."

"It was my fault," he went on, "that it was not beautiful all through. I
ought to have let her take up her work again, as she wished to, when she
found what giving it up meant to her. The world was narrower then than
it is now; and I listened to the world. I thought it another voice."

"It's difficult to tell, isn't it?" she said. "I wonder how one can?"

He did not answer; and they sat for a time in silence.

"Did you ever see her act?" asked Joan.

"Every evening for about six months," he answered. A little flame shot
up and showed a smile upon his face.

"I owe to her all the charity and tenderness I know. She taught it to me
in those months. I might have learned more if I had let her go on
teaching. It was the only way she knew."

Joan watched her as gradually she shaped herself out of the shadows: the
poor, thin, fretful lady of the ever restless hands, with her bursts of
jealous passion, her long moods of sullen indifference: all her music
turned to waste.

"How did she come to fall in love with you?" asked Joan. "I don't mean
to be uncomplimentary, Dad." She laughed, taking his hand in hers and
stroking it. "You must have been ridiculously handsome, when you were
young. And you must always have been strong and brave and clever. I can
see such a lot of women falling in love with you. But not the artistic
woman."

"It wasn't so incongruous at the time," he answered. "My father had sent
me out to America to superintend a contract. It was the first time I had
ever been away from home, though I was nearly thirty; and all my pent-up
youth rushed out of me at once. It was a harum-scarum fellow, mad with
the joy of life, that made love to her; not the man who went out, nor the
man who came back. It was at San Francisco that I met her. She was
touring the Western States; and I let everything go to the wind and
followed her. It seemed to me that Heaven had opened up to me. I fought
a duel in Colorado with a man who had insulted her. The law didn't run
there in those days; and three of his hired gunmen, as they called them,
held