She had finished her repairs on his coat and rising now held it up to him.  While he was groping for the sleeves, she asked quietly, “Who is the princess, Tony?  The dumb little princess with the blue eyes.”

For a second he stood just as he was, like one suddenly frozen, then he settled into his coat, walked over to his work chair and dropped into it, leaning forward and propping up his head with his hands.  “Yes,” he said.  “In a way, perhaps, there is some one.  That’s what I was going to tell you about.  She came in as quiet as a little ghost, just as Mrs. Wollaston was beginning to sing and she sat down beside me without a word.  And somehow while we listened, we—­we were the same person.  I can’t make you understand that.  It never happened to me before, nothing in the least like it, nothing so—­intimate.  I felt that song go vibrating right through her.  She didn’t speak at all, even after it was over, except to say that we mustn’t talk—­while we were waiting for the people in the other room to go away.  And then Mrs. Wollaston came and got me.  She didn’t see her at all.  She had disappeared somehow by that time.”

He stopped but Jennie, it seemed, had nothing to say just then.  She turned away to her outdoor wrap but she laid it down again and stood still when he went on.

“You don’t want to run away with the idea that I’m in love with her,” he said.  “That isn’t it.  That’s particularly—­not it.  I haven’t an idea who she is nor any intention of trying to find out.  Even if I knew the way to begin getting acquainted with her, I’m inclined to think I’d avoid it.  But as an abstraction—­no, that’s not what I mean—­as a symbol of what I’ll find waiting for me whenever I get down to the core of things ...  I’ve got a sort of—­superstition if I don’t do anything to—­to break the spell, you know, that sometime she’ll come back just the way she came that night.”

With a little exaggeration of the significance of the act, she put on the coat she had crossed the room to get.  He got up and came over to help her but he stopped with a sudden clenching of the hands, and a wave of color in his face as he saw the look in hers.  At that she came swiftly to meet him, pulled him up in a tight embrace and kissed him.

“Good luck, my dear,” she said.  “I must be running and so must you.  I’d take you with me only we go different ways.  Carry your score along to the Wollastons.  That’s the first step to the princess, I guess.”

CHAPTER IX

IN HARNESS

The episode upon which March had built the opera he called The Outcry, was one that was current during the autumn of 1914.  A certain Belgian town had been burnt and it had been officially explained that this was done because the German officer who was billeted upon the burgomaster had been shot.  The story was that the burgomaster’s son shot him because he had raped his sister.  The thing