“Then it’s like that with you,” he said, pointing.  “If there is the fire in you, it is covered up with ashes.”

She did not reply for a moment.

“I think you’ve hit it there,” she said.  “I believe there is the fire; when, as I said, he plays for me I know there is.  But the ashes?  What are they?  And who shall disperse them for me?”

She stood up swiftly, drawing herself to her full height and stretching her arms out.

“There’s something bigger than we know coming,” she said.  “Whether it’s storm or sunshine I have no idea.  But there will be something that shall utterly sever Michael and me or utterly unite us.”

“Do you care which it is?” he asked.

“Yes, I care,” said she.

He held out his hands to her, and she pulled him up to his feet.

“What are you going to say, then, when he asks you?” he said.

“Tell him he must wait.”

He went round the room putting out the electric lamps and opening the big skylight in the roof.  There was a curtain in front of this, which he pulled aside, and from the frosty cloudless heavens the starshine of a thousand constellations filtered down.

“That’s a lot to ask of any man,” he said.  “If you care, you care.”

“And if you were a girl you would know exactly what I mean,” she said.  “They may know they care, but, unless they are marrying for perfectly different reasons, they have to feel to the end of their fingers that they care before they can say ‘Yes.’”

He opened the door for her to pass out, and they walked up the passage together arm-in-arm.

“Well, perhaps Michael won’t ask you,” he said, “in which case all bother will be saved, and we shall have sat up talking till—­Sylvia, did you know it is nearly three—­sat up talking for nothing!”

Sylvia considered this.

“Fiddlesticks!” she said.

And Hermann was inclined to agree with her.

This view of the case found confirmation next day, for Michael, after his music lesson, lingered so firmly and determinedly when the three chatted together over the fire that in the end Hermann found nothing to do but to leave them together.  Sylvia had given him no sign as to whether she wished him to absent himself or not, and he concluded, since she did not put an end to things by going away herself, that she intended Michael to have his say.

The latter rose as the door closed behind Hermann, and came and stood in front of her.  And at the moment Sylvia could notice nothing of him except his heaviness, his plainness, all the things that she had told herself before did not really matter.  Now her sensation contradicted that; she was conscious that the ash somehow had vastly accumulated over her fire, that all her affection and regard for him were suddenly eclipsed.  This was a complete surprise to her; for the moment she found Michael’s presence and his proximity to her simply distasteful.