of sentences cut short because their completed meaning was always sorrow, of normal life dissolved to tears, the chords of Beethoven sounded serenely.

"So you like Jenny," said Kitty, suddenly, "to play Beethoven when it's the war that's caused all this. I could have told that you would have chosen to play German music this night of all nights."

So I began a saraband by Purcell, a jolly thing that makes one see a plump, sound woman dancing on a sanded floor in some old inn, with casks of good ale all about her and a world of sunshine and May lanes without. As I played I wondered if things like this happened when Purcell wrote such music, empty of everything except laughter and simple greeds and satisfactions and at worst the wail of unrequited love. Why had modern life brought forth these horrors, which made the old tragedies seem no more than nursery-shows? And the sky also is different. Behind Chris's head, as he halted at the open window, a search-light turned all ways in the night, like a sword brandished among the stars.

"Kitty."

"Yes, Chris." She was sweet and obedient and alert.

"I know my conduct must seem to you perversely insulting,"—behind him the search-light wheeled while he gripped the sides of the window,—"but if I do not see Margaret Allington I shall die."

She raised her hands to her jewels, and pressed the cool globes of her pearls into her flesh. "She lives near here," she said easily. "I will send the car down for her to-morrow. You shall see as much of her as you like."

His arms fell to his sides.

"Thank you," he muttered; "you're all being so kind—" He disengaged himself into the darkness.

I was amazed at Kitty's beautiful act and more amazed to find that it had made her face ugly. Her eyes snapped as they met mine.

"That dowd!" she said, keeping her voice low, so that he might not hear it as he passed to and fro before the window. "That dowd!"

This sudden abandonment of beauty and amiability meant so much in our Kitty, whose law of life is grace, that I went over and kissed her.

"Dear, you're taking things all the wrong way," I said. "Chris is ill—"

"He's well enough to remember her all right," she 

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