that had decided her to the choice of her pair of chestnuts.  She told him about the journey to France, the buying of the trousseau, and the day that Madame Savelli had said, “If you’ll stay with me a year, I’ll make something wonderful of you.”  She told him how Owen had sent her to the Bois by herself, and the madness that had risen to her brain:  and how near she had been to standing up in the carriage and asking the people to listen to her.  She told the tale of all this mental excitement fluently, volubly, carried away by the narrative.  Suddenly she ceased speaking, and sat absorbed by the mystery.

She sat looking into that corner of the garden where the gardener on a high ladder worked his shears without pausing.  The light branches fell, and she thought of how she had grown up in this obscure suburb amid old instruments and old music.  She remembered her yearning for fame and love; now she had both, love and fame.  But within herself nothing was changed; the same little soul was now as it had been long ago, she could hear it talking, living its intense life within her unknown to everyone, an uncommunicable thing, unchanged among much change.  She remembered how Owen, like Siegfried, had come to release her, and all the exhausting passion of that time.  She had sat with him under this very tree.  She was sitting there now with Ulick.  Everything was changed, yet everything was the same....  She was going to fall in love with another man, that was all.

She awoke with a start, frightened as by a dream; and before she had time to inquire of herself if the dream might come true, she remembered the girl with whom Ulick used to play Mozart in a drawing-room hung with faded tapestries.  She feared that he would divulge nothing, and to her surprise he told her that it had happened two years ago at Dieppe, where he had gone for a month’s holiday.  At that time when he was writing “Connla and the Fairy Maiden.”  He had composed a great deal of the music by the sea-shore and in sequestered woods; and to assist himself in the composition of the melodies, he used to take his violin with him.  One day, while wandering along the dusty high road on the look out for a secluded, shady place, he had come upon what seemed to be a private park.  It was guarded by a high wall, and looking through an iron gate that had been left ajar, he was tempted by the stillness of the glades.  “A music-haunted spot if ever there was one,” he said to himself; and encouraged by the persuasion of a certain melody which he felt he could work out there, and nowhere but there, he pushed the gate open, and entered the park.  A perfect place it seemed to him, no one but the birds to hear him, and the sun’s rays did not pierce the thick foliage of the sycamore grove.  Never did place correspond more intimately with the mood of the moment, and he played his melody over and over again, every now and then stopping to write.  Her step was so light, and he was so deep to his music,