‘That I can easily do.  Long ago he married a young lady of Dunfield.’

‘Then what did it mean? what did it mean?’

Mrs. Baxendale merely shook her head.

A few months later, Beatrice astonished everyone by her first appearance as a public singer.  Wilfrid had as little anticipated such a step as any other of Beatrice’s friends.  What was about to happen only became known a day or two in advance.  Mrs. Ashley Birks was paralysed with horror; she implored, she reasoned, she put on her face of cold anger.  Mr. Athel cried ‘What the deuce!’ and forthwith held a serious colloquy with his son.  Wilfrid experienced a certain joy, only tempered with anxiety as to the result of the experiment.  If it proved a success, he felt that the effect upon himself would be to draw him nearer to Beatrice; but it must be a great success.  He calculated on imaginative influences as other men do on practical issues.  Beatrice, acknowledged as more than an amateur, perchance publicly recognised as really a great singer, would impress him in a new way; he might overcome his impartial way of regarding her.  The result, outwardly, answered his fullest hopes.  Beatrice had not idly risked what would have been a deplorable fiasco; she had the encouragement of those who did not speak in vain, and her ambition had fired itself as she perceived the results of her conscientious labour.  Her nervousness throughout the day of the concert was terrible, but little less than her life depended on the result, and at the hour of trial she was strong to conquer.  Very far behind her, as she stepped out to that large audience, were the dilettante successes of drawing-room and charitable concerts; she smiled at all that flow; since then she had unlearnt so much and wrought with such humility.  But what she strove for was won; she knew it in the grasp of Wilfrid’s hand when he led her to her carriage.  Her veil was down; behind it she was sobbing.

‘Am I nothing more than a frivolous woman now?’ she said, leaning to him from the carriage.

Wilfrid could make no answer, and she was whirled away from him.

He went to her the next day, and asked her to be his wife.  Beatrice looked him in the face long and steadily.  Then she asked: 

‘Do you love me, Wilfrid?’

‘I love you.’

Another word trembled on her tongue, but the temptation of her bliss was too great; the contained ardour of long years had its way, sweeping doubt and memory before it.

’For your sake I have done it all.  What do I care for a whole world’s praise, compared with one word of recognition from you!  You remember the morning when you told me of my faults, when we all but seemed to quarrel?  Ah!  I have faults in abundance still, but have I not done one thing worth doing, done it thoroughly, as net everyone could?  I am not only a woman of the world, of society and fashion?  Do I not know how contemptible that is?  But only you could raise me above it.’