t ask my opinion first. He will strew
your limbs, Robert, over this delightful terrace."

"Michael's train is late," said Lady Ashbridge, hearing the stable clock
strike. "He should have been here before this."

Barbara had still a word to say, and disregarded this quencher.

"But don't think, Robert," she said, "that because Michael resists your
wishes and authority, he will be enjoying himself. He will hate doing
it, but that will not stop him."

Lord Ashbridge was not a bully; he had merely a profound sense of his
own importance.

"We will see about resistance," he said.

Barbara was not so successful on this occasion, and exploded loudly:

"You will, dear, indeed," she said.

Michael meantime had been travelling down from London without perturbing
himself over the scene with his father which he knew lay before him.
This was quite characteristic of him; he had a singular command over his
imagination when he had made up his mind to anything, and never indulged
in the gratuitous pain of anticipation. Today he had an additional
bulwark against such self-inflicted worries, for he had spent his last
two hours in town at the vocal recital of a singer who a month before
had stirred the critics into rhapsody over her gift of lyric song.
Up till now he had had no opportunity of hearing her; and, with the
panegyrics that had been showered on her in his mind, he had gone with
the expectation of disappointment. But now, an hour afterwards, the
wheels of the train sang her songs, and in the inward ear he could
recapture, with the vividness of an hallucination, the timbre of
that wonderful voice and also the sweet harmonies of the pianist who
accompanied her.

The hall had been packed from end to end, and he had barely got to his
seat, the only one vacant in the whole room, when Miss Sylvia Falbe
appeared, followed at once by her accompanist, whose name occurred
nowhere on the programme. Two neighbours, however, who chatted shrilly
during the applause that greeted them, informed him that this was
Hermann, "dear Hermann; there is no one like him!" But it occurred to
Michael that the singer was like him, though she was fair and he dark.
But his perception of either of them visually was but vague; he had come
to hear and not to see. Neither she nor Hermann had any music with them,
and Hermann just glanced at the programme, which he put down on the top
of the piano, which, again unusually, was open. Then without pause they