Sylvia was immensely disconcerted by her rustic naivete in not thinking of this obvious device.  “Oh, of course!  How could I have been so—­but I was tired when I came to start home—­I was very tired—­too tired to think clearly!”

This brought them all back to the recollection of what had set her off on her walk.  There was for a time rather a strained silence; but they were all very hungry—­dinner was two hours late—­and the discussion of Yoshido’s roast duckling was anything but favorable for the consideration of painful topics.  They had champagne to celebrate her safe escape from the adventure.  To the sensation of perfect ease induced by the well-chosen dinner this added a little tingling through all Sylvia’s nerves, a pleasant, light, bright titillation.

All might have gone well if, after the dinner, Felix had not stepped, as was his wont, to the piano.  Sylvia had been, up to that moment, almost wholly young animal, given over to bodily ecstasy, of which not the least was the agreeable warmth on her silk-clad ankle as she held her slippered foot to the fire.

But at the first chords something else in her, slowly, with extreme pain, awoke to activity.  All her life music had spoken a language to which she could not shut her ears, and now—­her face clouded, she shifted her position, she held up a little painted screen to shield her face from the fire, she finally rose and walked restlessly about the room.  Every grave and haunting cadence from the piano brought to her mind, flickering and quick, like fire, a darting question, and every one she stamped out midway, with an effort of the will.

The intimacy between Felix and Aunt Victoria, it was strange she had never before thought—­of course not—­what a hideous idea!  That book, back in Lydford, with Horace Gilbert’s name on the fly-leaf, and Aunt Victoria’s cool, casual voice as she explained, “Oh, just a young architect who used to—­” Oh, the man in the Pantheon was simply brutalized by drugs; he did not know what he was saying.  His cool, spectral laugh of sanity sounded faintly in her ears again.

And then, out of a mounting foam of arpeggios, there bloomed for her a new idea, solid enough, broad enough, high enough, for a refuge against all these wolfish fangs.  She sat down to think it out, hot on the trail of an answer, the longed-for answer.

It had just occurred to her that there was no possible logical connection between any of those skulking phantoms and the golden lovely things they tried to defile.  Even if some people of wealth and ease and leisure were not as careful about moral values as about colors, and aesthetic harmonies—­that meant nothing.  The connection was purely fortuitous.  How silly she had been not to see that.  Grant, for purposes of argument, that Aunt Victoria was self-centered and had lived her life with too little regard for its effect on other people,—­grant even that Felix had, under an almost overpowering temptation, not