As she was near the piano she sat down on the stool, while he took a small chair and established himself near the corner of the instrument, at the upper end of the keyboard.  The shaded lamp cast a little light on both their faces, as the two looked at each other, and Margaret realised that she was not only very fond of him, but that his whole existence represented something she had lost and wished to get back, but feared that she could never have again.  For many months she had not felt like her old self till a week ago, when he had come to see her after she had landed.

They had been in love with each other before she had begun her career, and she would have married him then, but a sort of quixotism, which was highly honourable if nothing else, had withheld him.  He had felt that his mother’s son had no right to marry Margaret Donne, though she had told him as plainly as a modest girl could that she was not of the same opinion.  Then had come Logotheti’s mad attempt to carry her off out of the theatre, after the dress rehearsal before her debut, and Madame Bonanni and Lushington between them had spirited her away just in time.  After that it had been impossible for him to keep up the pretence of avoiding her, and a sort of intimacy had continued, which neither of them quite admitted to be love, while neither would have called it mere friendship.

The most amazing part of the whole situation was that Margaret had continued to see Logotheti as if he had not actually tried to carry her off in his motor-car, very much against her will.  And in spite of former jealousies and a serious quarrel Logotheti and Lushington spoke to each other when they met.  Possibly Lushington consented to treat him civilly because the plot for carrying off Margaret had so completely failed that its author had got himself locked up on suspicion of being a fugitive criminal.  Lushington, feeling that he had completely routed his rival on that occasion, could afford to be generous.  Yet the man of letters, who was a born English gentleman on his father’s side, and who was one altogether by his bringing up, was constantly surprised at himself for being willing to shake hands with a Greek financier who had tried to run away with an English girl; and possibly, in the complicated workings of his mind and conflicting sensibilities, half Anglo-Saxon and half Southern French, his present conduct was due to the fact that Margaret Donne had somehow ceased to be a ‘nice English girl’ when she joined the cosmopolitan legion that manoeuvres on the international stage of ‘Grand Opera.’  How could a ‘nice English girl’ remain herself if she associated daily with such people as Pompeo Stromboli, Schreiermeyer, Herr Tiefenbach and Signorina Baci-Roventi, the Italian contralto who could pass for a man so well that she was said to have fought a real duel with sabres and wounded her adversary before he discovered that she was the very lady he had lately left for another—­a regular Mademoiselle de Maupin!  Had not Lushington once seen her kiss Margaret on both cheeks in a moment of enthusiastic admiration?  He was not the average young man who falls in love with a singer, either; he knew the stage and its depths only too well, for he had his own mother’s life always before him, a perpetual reproach.