A moment later she came around the table and seated herself, facing him, upon the arm of his chair; clasped his neck with her two hands.  “You’re tired,” she said.  “How much sleep did you have last night?” And on his admitting that he hadn’t had any, she exclaimed against his working himself to death like that.

No memory, though he made a conscious effort to recover it, of his audacious success during the small hours of that morning in bringing triumphantly into the world the small new life that Pollard would have destroyed, came back to fortify him; no trace of his own afterglow that had so fascinated and alarmed his sister.  “I shall sleep fast for an hour or two this morning and make it up,” he told Paula.

“I do wish you might have been there last night,” she said after a little silence.  “I don’t believe I’ve ever sung so well;—­could have, at least, if there had been room enough to turn around in.  It was all there; it’s getting bigger all the time.  Not just the voice, if you know what I mean, darling, but what I could do with it.”

“It was partly Novelli, I suspect,” he said.  “Having him for an accompanist, I mean.  He’s very good indeed, isn’t he?”

“Oh, yes, he’s good,” she assented absently.  “Awfully good.  And he is a nice furry little enthusiastic thing; like a faun, rather; exciting to play with of course.  But it wasn’t that.  It’s you, really—­being in love with you the way I am.  I suppose that’s the very best thing that could possibly have happened to me.  I’m another person altogether from that girl you found in Vienna.  Just where she left off, I begin.”

She uttered a little laugh then of sheer exuberance and with a strong embrace, pressed his head hard against her breast.  He yielded passively, made no response of his own beyond a deep-drawn breath or two.  A moment later when she had released him and risen to her feet, he rose too.

“Would Novelli be procurable?” he asked.  “Could he be engaged regularly, as an accompanist for you and so on?”

She looked at him rather oddly.  “Why, I don’t need him,” she said, “as long as I am just playing.  Of course, if I were to go regularly to work, somebody like him would be almost necessary.”

There was a tight little silence for a few seconds after that, he once more evading her eyes.  “It seems to me you work most of the time as it is,” he said.  Then he announced his intention of going up-stairs to take a nap.  He wasn’t going to the hospital until eleven.

He did go up to his room and lay down upon his bed and, eventually, he slept.  But for an hour, his mind raced like an idle motor.  That nonsense of Lucile’s about Portia Stanton’s folly in marrying a young musician whose big Italian eyes would presently begin looking soulfully at some one else.  Had they already looked like that at Paula?  Jealousy itself wasn’t a base emotion.  Betraying it was all that mattered.  You couldn’t