Then the voices and laughter were hushed, Herr Edelhart gave the sign, and the quartette began, led off by the low notes of the violoncello. Clifford Thornton and Katharine, sitting in different corners of the room, lost themselves in the wonderful regions which music, with a single wave of her magic wand, opens to every one desirous of entering.

"Behold my kingdom," she whispers, "wander unharmed in all directions—you will find the paths for yourselves——"

Clifford Thornton, with the war of conflicting emotions in his heart, entered and found the path of peace.

Katharine entered too, and trod unconsciously the path of noble discontent with self and circumstance.

"Ah, how one rests," thought the man.

"Ah, what an aimless, lonely life I've been leading,"[39] thought the woman. "No use to myself or any one——" The sounds died away, and the listeners came back from their distant wanderings. Katharine looked up and met the grave glance of the stranger.

[39]

He seemed to be asking her:

"Where did we meet, you and I?"

And her silent answer was:

"I cannot tell you, but I have known you always."

Two or three times during the next quartette, of Brahms, she was impelled to look in his direction, and saw him sitting alone at the other end of the room, in an isolation of frigid reserve, staring straight at her as over a vast, with that strange expression of inquiry on his thin drawn face. She was curiously stirred, curiously uneasy too. She was almost glad when the quartette was over and he rose to go.

He went up to the players and thanked them. Then he turned to Katharine.

"Good-bye," he said, and a ghost of a smile, which he repressed immediately, began to cross his face. "I have been trying to think——"

He broke off.

"Good-bye," he said, and he went to the door.

Ronald followed him out of the room, and every one was silent, until Signor Luigi made an elaborate gesticulation with his right forefinger, and finally landed it in the centre of his forehead.

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