“Did you take her driving?” This came in a thin, piccolo tone-barely enough room for it to escape through her lips.  All the big drums and heavy brass were now being moved up.

“No; had nothing to take her out in.  Why do you ask?  What has happened, little—­”

“Take anybody else?” she interrupted.

“No.”

He spoke quite frankly and simply.  At any other time she would have believed him.  She had always done so in matters of this kind, partly because she didn’t much care and partly because she made it a point never to doubt the word of a man, either by suspicion or inference, who was attentive to her.  This time she did care, and she intended to tell him so.  All she dreaded was that the big horns and the tom-toms would get away from her leadership and the hoped-for, correctly played symphony end in an uproar.

“Max,” she said, turning her head and lifting her finger at him with the movement of a conductor’s baton, “how can you lie to me like that?  You never went near your lawyer; you went to see Miss Billeton, and you’ve spent every minute with her since you left me.  Don’t tell me you didn’t.  I know everything you’ve done, and—­” Bass drums, bass viols, bassoons—­everything—­was loose now.

She had given up her child to be with him!  Everything, in fact—­all her people at Yardley; her dear old nurse.  She had lied to Jane about chaperoning Sue—­all to come down and keep him from being lonely.  What she wanted was a certain confidence in return.  It made not the slightest difference to her how many women he loved, or how many women loved him; she didn’t love him, and she never would; but unless she was treated differently from a child and like the woman that she was, she was going straight back to Yardley, and then back to Paris, etc., etc.

She knew, as she rushed on in a flood of abuse such as only a woman can let loose when she is thoroughly jealous and entirely angry, that she was destroying the work of months of plotting, and that he would be lost to her forever, but she was powerless to check the torrent of her invective.  Only when her breath gave out did she stop.

Max had sat still through it all, his eyes expressing first astonishment and then a certain snap of admiration, as he saw the color rising and falling in her cheeks.  It was not the only time in his experience that he had had to face similar outbursts.  It was the first time, however, that he had not felt like striking back.  Other women’s outbreaks had bored him and generally had ended his interest in them—­ this one was more charming than ever.  He liked, too, her American pluck and savage independence.  Jealous she certainly was, but there was no whine about it; nor was there any flop at the close—­floppy women he detested—­had always done so.  Lucy struck straight out from her shoulder and feared nothing.

As she raged on, the grays beating the water with their well-polished hoofs, he continued to sit perfectly still, never moving a muscle of his face nor changing his patient. tolerant expression.  The best plan, he knew, was to let all the steam out of the boiler and then gradually rake the fires.