“Paula...” she said, and stopped in sheer surprise that her voice had come at all; then began again, “Paula wanted you to tune her piano.  At Ravinia.  I was angry, at that, until she reminded me that you wouldn’t be.”

His hand laid down the small, odd shaped tool it held, but the next moment picked it up again.

“I shouldn’t have minded tuning her piano,” he told her.

“I know,” she said.  “I knew as soon as I had had a minute in which to—­gather you up.  And when I had done that, I helped her try to find you.  I had a special reason, a different one from Paula’s, for hoping that we could.  And for my reason,” she went on, trembling a little and finding it harder to make her words come steadily, “it isn’t—­yet, too late.

“You see if you were there with her where she could see you every day—­there’d be a lot of pianos there she said; enough to keep you going—­she’d remember you again.  She is like that.  Lots of people are, I suppose.  When she doesn’t see you, she forgets.  But if she remembered how much she liked you and how good your opera was,—­the real one, the one you wrote for yourself—­she might do something about it.—­To get it played—­so that you could hear it.  Now that she’s had a great success, she could do almost anything quite easily, I think.  Infinitely more than I. I’ve been trying, but I haven’t got very far.”

He laid down the tool once more and locked his hands together.  “You have been trying?” he repeated.  The tension, like the grip of his hands, was drawing up almost unbearably.

“There’s a French baritone there, Fournier, who could play your officer’s part.  As you meant it to be played, I think.  But he doesn’t sing in English.  I thought it might be possible, if you didn’t mind its being sung in French, to translate it.  That’s one of the things I’ve been—­trying to do.”

And then with a gasp and a sob, “Oh, don’t,—­don’t hurt them like that!” she reached out and took the hands she wanted.

He responded to the caress, as before, so quickly that one could hardly have known where it began; only Mary did know.  She looked up then into his face, steadily, open-eyed, though she could not see much for the blur.

“This time,” he said, laboriously,—­“this time it isn’t the song.”

She shook her head.

“I couldn’t have waited, like that,” he told her, three breaths later, “except for being afraid that if I tried to touch you, you wouldn’t be there at all.  Like a fairy story;—­or a dream.  I have never been sure that the other time wasn’t.”

“It’s real enough,” she said.  “You’re sure now, aren’t you?”

His answer, the one she meant him to make, was to draw her up into a deep embrace, his lips upon hers.

“What does it mean?” he asked, when they had drawn back from it.

She smiled at that.  “You don’t need ask.  That’s the Wollaston trick, to ask for meanings and reasons.”  She added, a moment later, “It means whatever it says to your heart.”