"Where have you met?" Ronald asked, turning first to Clifford and then to Katharine. "On your travels?"
"I do not know," they said together, and they still stood motionless, arrested of body and spirit.
"Well, now for the quartette," said the musicians, and they resined their bows and tuned up. It was their habit to go into raptures over their respective instruments; so that sighs of content, and mysterious expressions of admiration, were soon filling the air. Signor Luigi bending over his violoncello, kept crying out:
"Ah, per Bacco, what for a treasure! Light of mine eyeballs—light of mine eyeballs—maccaroni of my native land, what for a beautiful treasure!"
They laughed as they always did laugh over the merry little Italian, and were just settling down to Beethoven's Rasomoffsky Quartette, when Signor Luigi remembered the Pomeranian.
"Ah, ha," he said, "the adorable dog will howl—he must go—he or I must go. We will depart him prestissimo. He will come very, very near and mock us. I know him, the rogue! Ah, Signor Professor, many thanks, no use you trying to do it. It needs a grand genius like myself to depart that amiable animal."
"And now I think we are safe," he said when he had expelled the reluctant white Pomeranian and shut the door.
Then the voices and laughter were hushed, Herr Edelhart gave the sign, and the quartette began, led off by the low notes of the violoncello. Clifford Thornton and Katharine, sitting in different corners of the room, lost themselves in the wonderful regions which music, with a single wave of her magic wand, opens to every one desirous of entering.
"Behold my kingdom," she whispers, "wander unharmed in all directions—you will find the paths for yourselves——"