“Jennie and I were lovers once,” he said.  “But that came to an end for both of us a good while ago.  Two or three years.  And the last time she came to this room—­one day in April it was—­I told her about you and about The Dumb Princess.”  He laid his hand upon the stack of manuscript.  “This.  I had come home from that night at your father’s house when you and I heard that song together, with my head full of it.  I went nearly mad fighting it out of my head while I tried to make over that other opera for Paula.”

“The Dumb Princess...?”

He nodded.  “You see you hardly spoke that night, only at the end to say we mustn’t talk.  So I came away thinking of some one under a spell.  A princess, the fairy sort of princess who could not speak until her true lover came to her.  But instead of that I tried to go on working at that Belgian horror and stuck at it until it was unendurable.  And then, when I came to the house to tell Paula so, it was you who came to me again, the first time since that night.”

There had come a faintly visible color into her cheeks and once more she smiled, reflectively.  “That’s what you meant then,” she mused.  “I couldn’t make it out.  You said just before you went away, ’That’s why it was so incredible when you came down the stairs instead.’”

She had remembered that!

“I ran away,” he confessed, “the moment I had said it, for fear of betraying myself.  And I went to work on The Dumb Princess that day.”

“You’ve done all that, a whole opera, since the fourteenth of May?”

“I worked on it,” he said, “until I had to stop for the little vacation that—­that ended at Hickory Hill.  And I came straight back to it from there.  I’ve been working at it all the time since.  Now, except for the scoring in the second part of the third act, it’s finished.  I thought it was the thing I wanted more than anything else in the world.  Just to get it written down on paper, the thing which that moment with you up in that little anteroom started.  I’ve pretty well done it.  As far as the music itself is concerned, I think I have done it.”

He paused there and pressed his lips together.  Then he went on speaking, stiffly, one word at a time.  “And I was saying to myself when you knocked that I would tear it up, every sheet of it, and set it alight in the stove yonder if it would take me back to that hour we had together at Hickory Hill.”

The tenderness of her voice when she replied (it had some of the characteristic qualities of his beloved woodwinds) did not preclude a bead of humor, almost mischief, from gilding the salient points of its modeling.

“I know,” she said.  “I can guess what that feeling must be; the perfect emptiness and despair of having a great work done.  I suspect there aren’t many great masterpieces that one couldn’t have bought cheap by offering the mess of pottage at the right moment.  Oh, no, I didn’t mean a sneer when I said cheap.  I really understand.  That very next morning out in the orchard, thinking over it, I managed to be glad you’d gone—­alone.  Your own way, rather than back with me to Ravinia.  But—­I’m glad I came to-night and I’m glad I know about—­The Dumb Princess.”