r clenched. All her muscles seemed to be relaxed. Ascher had crept
over close to her. He lay back beside her, and I saw that he held one of
her hands clasped in his. His eyes were fixed intently on hers, and even
as I watched I saw her lids droop before his gaze. She gave a long, soft
sigh of satisfaction.

I realised that Ascher and his wife were lovers still, though they had
been married for a score or more of years. That strange emotion, which
touches human life with romance for a year or two and then fades into
a tolerant companionship, had endured with them. In some way altogether
unknown to me the music and all the art in which they delighted had the
power of; stimulating afresh or re-creating again and again the passion
which drew them together. Under the influence of art they enjoyed a
mystical communion with each other, not wholly spiritual, but like all
mysticism, a mixture of the physical, the ecstasy of contact, actual or
imagined, with yearnings and emotions in which the body has no part.

I suppose the music had its effect on me, too, gave me for a few moments
a power of sympathy not usually mine. I understood Ascher as I had never
understood him before. I knew that the man I had hitherto seen, austere,
calm, intellectual, the great financier whom the world sought, was a
man with a mask before his face; that accident and the excitement of the
music had enabled me to see the face behind the mask. I understood, or
supposed I understood, Mrs. Ascher, too. All her foolish fine phrases
and absurd enthusiasms were like cries in which tortured creatures find
some kind of relief from pain, or the low, crooning laughter of a young
mother with her baby at her breast. They were the inevitable, almost
hysterical gaspings of a spirit wrought upon over highly and over often
by the passion of romantic love. A mask hid the man's face. The woman
was not strong enough to wear it.

CHAPTER XII.

It is difficult now, in 1915, to regard the things which happened during
the first half of last year as events in any proper sense of the word.
But at the time they excited us all very much, and we felt that the
whole future of the country, the empire, perhaps of the human race,
depended on how the Government met the crisis with which it was faced.
It seems curious that we could have believed such a thing, but we did.

I remember quite distinctly the circumstances under which I first heard
the news of the protest made by ce