Mrs. Vandervelde was a brilliant pianist, and after dinner Hayden begged her to play.  Under cover of the music, he watched Mrs. Champneys.  She was sitting almost opposite him, and he could observe her changing countenance.  Nancy was beginning to love and understand good music.  Men create music; women receive and carry it as they receive and carry life.  It is quite as much a part of themselves.

Nancy’s eyes shadowed.  She leaned back in her chair, and the man watched the curve of her white cheek and throat, and the thick braids of her red hair.  She had forgotten his presence.  He was saying to himself, with something of wonder, “No, she’s not beautiful:  but, my God! how real she is!” when, subtly drawn by the intensity of his gaze, she turned, looked at him with her clouded eyes, and smiled vaguely.  Still smiling, she turned her head again and gave herself up to listening, unconscious that destiny had clapped her upon the shoulder.

The man sat quite still.  It had come to him with, the suddenness of a lightning stroke, and his first feeling was one of stunned amazement, and an almost incredulous resentment.  He had gone to and fro in the earth and walked up and down in it, comfortably immune, an amused and ironic looker-on.  And now, at thirty, without rhyme or reason he had fallen in love with a red-haired young woman of whom he knew absolutely nothing, beyond the bare fact that she was Jason Vandervelde’s ward.  A woman who didn’t conform to any standard he had ever set for himself, whose mind was a closed book to him, of whose very existence he had been ignorant until to-night.  Old Dame Destiny must have sniggered when she thrust Mrs. Peter Champneys, nee Nancy Simms, into the exquisitely ordered life of Mr. Berkeley Hayden!

He presently discovered from Jason all that the trustee of the Champneys estate knew of Mrs. Peter, which really wasn’t very much, as the lawyer and his wife had never seen Nancy until the morning of her marriage.  And he didn’t have much to say about her as she was then.  Hayden gathered that it was a marriage of convenience, for family reasons—­to keep the money in the family.  He asked a few questions about Peter, whom Vandervelde thought a likely young fellow enough, but whom Hayden fancied must be a poor sort—­probably a freak with a pseudo-artistic temperament.  There couldn’t have been very much love lost between a husband and wife who had consented to so singular a separation.  Hayden had a very poor opinion of Mr. Peter Champneys!  But he was fiercely glad it hadn’t been a love-match, glad that that other man’s claim upon Anne was at the best nominal, that theirs was a marriage in name only.

He saw her several times before her departure, and came no nearer to understanding her.  The night before they sailed, he gave a dinner in his apartment, an old aunt of his, more enchanting at sixty than at sixteen, being the only other guest.  That apartment with its brocaded walls and its marvelous furniture was a revelation to Nancy.  It was like an opened door to her.