Tavernake looked at her wonderingly.  She was, indeed, under the spell of some deep emotion.  Her memory seemed to have carried her back into another world, somewhere far away from this dingy little sitting-room which they two were sharing together, back into a world where life and death were matters of small moment, where the great passions were unchained, and men and women moved among the naked things of life.  Almost he felt the thrill of it.  It was something new to him, the touch of a magic finger upon his eyelids.  Then the moment passed and he was himself again, matter-of-fact, prosaic.

“Let us dismiss the subject finally,” he said.  “I must see your sister on business to-morrow, but it shall be for the last time.”

“I think,” she murmured, “that you will be wise.”

He crossed the room and returned with a newspaper.

“I saw your music in the hall as I came in,” he remarked.  “Are you singing to-night?”

The question was entirely in his ordinary tone.  It brought her back to the world of every-day things as nothing else could have done.

“Yes; isn’t it luck?” she told him.  “Three in one week.  I only heard an hour ago.”

“A city dinner?” he inquired.

“Something of the sort,” she replied.  “I am to be at the Whitehall Rooms at ten o’clock.  If you are tired, Leonard, please let me go alone.  I really do not mind.  I can get a ’bus to the door, there and back again.”

“I am not tired,” he declared.  “To tell you the truth, I scarcely know what it is to be tired.  I shall go with you, of course.”

She looked at him with a momentary admiration of his powerful frame, his strong, forceful face.

“It seems too bad,” she remarked, “after a long day’s work to drag you out again.”

He smiled.

“I really like to come,” he assured her.  “Besides,” he added, after a moment’s pause, “I like to hear you sing.”

“I wonder if you mean that?” she asked, looking at him curiously.  “I have watched you once or twice when I have been singing to you.  Do you really care for it?”

“Certainly I do.  How can you doubt it?  I do not,” he continued, slowly, “understand music, or anything of that sort, of course, any more than I do the pictures you take me to see, and some of the books you talk about.  There are lots of things I can’t get the hang of entirely, but they all leave a sort of pleasure behind.  One feels it even if one only half appreciates.”

She came over to his chair.

“I am glad,” she said, a little wistfully, “that there is one thing I do which you like.”

He looked at her reprovingly.

“My dear Beatrice,” he said, “I often wish I could make you understand how extraordinarily helpful and useful to me you have been.”

“Tell me in what way?” she begged.

“You have given me,” he assured her, “an insight into many things in life which I had found most perplexing.  You see, you have traveled and I haven’t.  You have mixed with all classes of people, and I have gone steadily on in one groove.  You have told me many things which I shall find very useful indeed later on.”