began his idyl, that nature and bird song of the awakening of the whole being to the passion of love.  Then it was that Evelyn’s face had a look of surprise, of pain, of profound disturbance; it was suffused with blushes, coming and going in passionate emotion; the eyes no longer blazed, but were softened in a melting tenderness of sympathy, and her whole person seemed to be carried into the stream of the great life passion.  When it ceased she sank back in her seat, and blushed still more, as if in fear that some one had discovered her secret.

Afterwards, when Philip had an opportunity of knowing Evelyn Mavick, and knowing her very well, and to some extent having her confidence, he used to say to himself that he had little to learn—­the soul of the woman was perfectly revealed to him that night of “Siegfried.”

As the curtain went down, Mrs. Mavick, whose attention had not been specially given to the artists before, was clapping her hands in a great state of excitement.

“Why don’t you applaud, child?”

“Oh, mother,” was all the girl could say, with heaving breast and downcast eyes.

X

All winter long that face seemed to get between Philip and his work.  It was an inspiration to his pen when it ran in the way of literature, but a distinct damage to progress in his profession.  He had seen Evelyn again, more than once, at the opera, and twice been excited by a passing glimpse of her on a crisp, sunny afternoon in the Mavick carriage in the Park-always the same bright, eager face.  So vividly personal was the influence upon him that it seemed impossible that she should not be aware of it—­impossible that she could not know there was such a person in the world as Philip Burnett.

Fortunately youth can create its own world.  Between the secluded daughter of millions and the law clerk was a great gulf, but this did not prevent Evelyn’s face, and, in moments of vanity, Evelyn herself, from belonging to Philip’s world.  He would have denied—­we have a habit of lying to ourselves quite as much as to others—­that he ever dreamed of possessing her, but nevertheless she entered into his thoughts and his future in a very curious way.  If he saw himself a successful lawyer, her image appeared beside him.  If his story should gain the public attention, and his occasional essays come to be talked of, it was Evelyn’s interest and approval that he caught himself thinking about.  And he had a conviction that she was one to be much more interested in him as a man of letters than as a lawyer.  This might be true.  In Philip’s story, which was very slowly maturing, the heroine fell in love with a young man simply for himself, and regardless of the fact that he was poor and had his career to make.  But he knew that if his novel ever got published the critics would call it a romance, and not a transcript of real life.  Had not women ceased to be romantic and ceased to indulge in vagaries of affection?