He faced the crowd, his hand upon her arm.  “Well, men,” he said, his words clean-cut and ready, “so you’ve left your wives behind, have you?  I on the contrary have brought mine, and she has promised to give you a song.”

The mutter died.  Some youths at the back started applause, which spread, though somewhat half-heartedly, through the crowd, and for a space the ugly feeling died down.

“We’ll get to business,” said Dick, and took out his banjo.

The concert began, Ashcott came up on to the platform and under cover of Dick’s jangling ragtime spoke in a low voice and urgently to Saltash.

The latter heard him with a laugh and a careless grimace, but a little later he leaned towards Juliet who sat behind the table and touched her unobtrusively.  She looked round at him almost with reluctance, and he whispered to her in rapid French.

She listened to him with raised brows, and then shook her head with a smile.  “No, of course not!  I am going to sing to them directly.  I am here to help—­not to make things worse.”

He shrugged his shoulders and said no more.  In a few minutes Dick’s cheery banjo thrummed into silence and he turned round.

“Are you ready?” he said to Juliet.

She rose and came forward, tall and graceful, bearing the unmistakable stamp of high-breeding in every delicate movement.  She might have been on the platform of a London concert-hall as she faced her audience under the shadowing hat.

They stared at her open-mouthed, spellbound, awed by the quiet dignity of her.  And in the hush that fell before her, Juliet began to sing.

Her voice was low, highly trained, exquisitely soft.  She sang an old English ballad with a throbbing sweetness that held her hearers with its charm.  And behind her Dick leaned against the table with his banjo and very softly accompanied her.

His face was in shadow also as he bent over the instrument.  Not once throughout the song did he look up.

When she ended, there came that involuntary pause which is the highest tribute that can be paid by any audience, and then such a thunder of applause as shook the building.  Saltash stepped forward to hand her back to her chair, but the men in front of her yelled so hoarse a protest that, laughing, he retired.

And Juliet sang again and again, thrilling the rough crowd as Dick had never thrilled them, choosing such old-world melodies as reach the hearts of all.  Saltash watched her with keen appreciation on his ugly face.  He was an accomplished musician himself.  But Dick with his banjo, though he responded unerringly to every shade of feeling in the beautiful voice, never raised his head.

It was he who at last came forward and led Juliet back to her chair, but by that time the temper of the men had completely changed.  They shouted good-humoured comments to him and bandied jokes among themselves.  The whole atmosphere of the place had altered.  The heavy sullenness had passed like a thunder-cloud, and Ashcott no longer smoked his pipe in the doorway with an air of gloomy foreboding.