“Please—­mayn’t I help?”

“Thank you.  It’s my affair.”

“It’ll be very, very expensive.”

“I shall manage it.”

“It would be kinder”—­her voice shook a little—­“if I might help.”

He considered it—­then said doubtfully: 

“Suppose you provide the records?—­the things it plays?  I don’t know anything about music—­and I have been racking my brains to think of somebody in Paris who could look after that part of it.”

Constance exclaimed.  Why, she had several friends in Paris, in the very thick of the musical world there!  She had herself had lessons all one winter in Paris at the Conservatoire from a dear old fellow—­a Pole—­a pupil of Chopin in his youth, and in touch with the whole Polish colony in Paris, which was steeped in music.

“He made love to me a little”—­she said, laughing—­“I’m sure he’d do anything for us.  I’ll write at once!  And there is somebody at the Embassy—­why, of course, I can set all kinds of people to work!”

And her feet began to dance along the road beside him.

“We must get some Polish music”—­she went on—­“there’s that marvellous young pianist they rave about in Paris—­Paderewski.  I’m sure he’d help!  Otto has often talked to me about him.  We must have lots of Chopin—­and Liszt—­though of course he wasn’t a Pole!—­And Polish national songs!—­Otto was only telling me to-day how Chopin loved them—­how he and Liszt used to go about the villages and farms and note them down.  Oh, we’ll have a wonderful collection!”

Her eyes shone in her small, flushed face.  They walked on fast, talking and dreaming, till there was Folly Bridge in front of them, and the beginnings of Oxford.  Falloden pulled up sharply.

“I must run back to him.  Will you come again?”

She held out her hand.  The moonlight, shining on his powerful face and curly hair, stirred in her a sudden, acute sense of delight.

“Oh yes—­we’ll come again.  But don’t leave him!—­don’t, please, think of it!  He trusts you—­he leans on you.”

“It is kind of you to believe it.  But I am no use!”

He put her back into the carriage, bowed formally, and was gone, running up the hill at an athlete’s pace.

The two ladies drove silently on, and were soon among the movement and traffic of the Oxford streets.  Connie’s mind was steeped in passionate feeling.  Till now Falloden had touched first her senses, then her pity.  Now in these painful and despondent attempts of his, to adjust himself to Otto’s weakness and irritability, he was stirring sympathies and enthusiasms in her which belonged to that deepest soul in Connie which was just becoming conscious of itself.  And all the more, perhaps, because in Falloden’s manner towards her there was nothing left of the lover.  For the moment at any rate she preferred it so.  Life was all doubt, expectation, thrill—­its colour heightened, its meanings underlined.  And in her complete uncertainty as to what turn it would take, and how the doubt would end, lay the spell—­the potent tormenting charm—­of the situation.