“Yes,” he answered.  “I have always loved you.”

She would not let him light the gas.  “I have dined—­in the train,” she explained.  “Let us talk by the firelight.”

She forced him gently back into his chair, and seated herself upon the floor between his knees.  “What were you thinking of when I came in?” she asked.  “You weren’t asleep, were you?”

“No,” he answered.  “Not that sort of sleep.”  She could not see his face.  But she guessed his meaning.

“Am I very like her?” she asked.

“Yes,” he answered.  “Marvellously like her as she used to be:  except for just one thing.  Perhaps that will come to you later.  I thought, for the moment, as you stood there by the door . . . " He did not finish the sentence.

“Tell me about her,” she said.  “I never knew she had been an actress.”

He did not ask her how she had learnt it.  “She gave it up when we were married,” he said.  “The people she would have to live among would have looked askance at her if they had known.  There seemed no reason why they should.”

“How did it all happen?” she persisted.  “Was it very beautiful, in the beginning?” She wished she had not added that last.  The words had slipped from her before she knew.

“Very beautiful,” he answered, “in the beginning.”

“It was my fault,” he went on, “that it was not beautiful all through.  I ought to have let her take up her work again, as she wished to, when she found what giving it up meant to her.  The world was narrower then than it is now; and I listened to the world.  I thought it another voice.”

“It’s difficult to tell, isn’t it?” she said.  “I wonder how one can?”

He did not answer; and they sat for a time in silence.

“Did you ever see her act?” asked Joan.

“Every evening for about six months,” he answered.  A little flame shot up and showed a smile upon his face.

“I owe to her all the charity and tenderness I know.  She taught it to me in those months.  I might have learned more if I had let her go on teaching.  It was the only way she knew.”

Joan watched her as gradually she shaped herself out of the shadows:  the poor, thin, fretful lady of the ever restless hands, with her bursts of jealous passion, her long moods of sullen indifference:  all her music turned to waste.

“How did she come to fall in love with you?” asked Joan.  “I don’t mean to be uncomplimentary, Dad.”  She laughed, taking his hand in hers and stroking it.  “You must have been ridiculously handsome, when you were young.  And you must always have been strong and brave and clever.  I can see such a lot of women falling in love with you.  But not the artistic woman.”