Lushington entered the room in a few moments and saw only the outline of her graceful figure, as if she were cut out in black against the glare from the big window. She turned, and a little of the shaded light from the piano fell upon her face, just enough to show him her expression, and though her glad smile welcomed him, there was anxiety in her brown eyes. He came forward, fair and supernaturally neat, as ever, and much more self-possessed than in former days. It was not their first meeting since she had landed, for he had been to see her late in the afternoon on the day of her arrival, and she had expected him; but she had felt a sort of constraint in his manner then, which was new to her, and they had talked for half an hour about indifferent things. Moreover, he had refused a second cup of tea, which was a sure sign that something was wrong. So she had asked him to come again a week later, naming the day, and she had been secretly disappointed because he did not protest against being put off so long. She wondered what had happened, for his letters, his cable to her when she had left America, and the flowers he had managed to send on board the steamer, had made her believe that he had not changed since they had parted before Christmas.

As she was near the piano she sat down on the stool, while he took a small chair and established himself near the corner of the instrument, at the upper end of the keyboard. The shaded lamp cast a little light on both their faces, as the two looked at each other, and Margaret realised that she was not only very fond of him, but that his whole existence represented something she had lost and wished to get back, but feared that she could never have again. For many months she had not felt like her old self till a week ago, when he had come to see her after she had landed.

They had been in love with each other before she had begun her career, and she would have married him then, but a sort of quixotism, which was highly honourable if nothing else, had withheld him. He had felt that his mother's son had no right to marry Margaret Donne, though she had told him as plainly as a modest girl could that she was not of the same opinion. Then had come Logotheti's mad attempt to carry her off out of the theatre, after the dress rehearsal before her début, and Madame Bonanni and Lushington between them had spirited her away just in time. After that it had been impossible for him to keep up the pretence of avoiding her, and a sort of intimacy had continued, which neither of them quite admitted to be love, while neither would have called it mere friendship.

The most amazing part of the whole situation was that Margaret had continued to see Logotheti as if he had not actually tried to carry her off in his motor-car, very much against her will. And in spite of former jealousies and a serious quarrel Logotheti and Lushington spoke to each other when they met. Possibly Lushington consented to treat him civilly because the plot for carrying off Margaret had so completely failed that its author had got himself locked up on suspicion of being a fugitive criminal. Lushington, feeling that he had completely routed his rival on that occasion, could afford to be generous. Yet the man of letters, who was a born English gentleman on his father's side, and who was one altogether by his bringing up, was constantly surprised at himself for being willing to shake hands with a Greek financier who had tried to run away with an English girl; and possibly, in the complicated workings of his mind and conflicting sensibilities, half Anglo-Saxon and half Southern French, his present conduct was due to the fact that Margaret Donne had somehow ceased to be a 'nice English girl' when she joined the cosmopolitan legion that manoeuvres on the international stage of 'Grand Opera.' How could a 'nice English girl' remain herself if she associated daily with such people as Pompeo Stromboli, Schreiermeyer, Herr Tiefenbach and Signorina Baci-Roventi, the Italian contralto who could pass for a man so well that she was said to have fought a real duel with sabres and wounded her adversary before he discovered that she was the very lady he had lately left for another—a regular Mademoiselle de Maupin! Had not Lushington once seen her kiss Margaret on both cheeks in a moment of enthusiastic admiration? He was not the average young man who falls in love with a singer, either; he knew the stage and its depths only too well, for he had his own mother's life always before him, a perpetual reproach.

Though Margaret had at first revolted inwardly against the details of her professional surroundings, she had grown used to them by sure and fatal degrees, and things that would once have disgusted her were indifferent to her now. Men who have been educated in conditions of ordinary refinement and who have volunteered in the ranks or gone to sea before the mast have experienced something very like what befell Margaret; but men are not delicately nurtured beings whose bloom is damaged by the rough air of reality, and the camp and the forecastle are not the stage. Perhaps nothing that is necessary shocks really sensible people; it is when disagreeable things are perfectly useless and quite avoidable—in theory—that they are most repugnant to men like Edmund Lushington. He had warned Margaret of what was in store for her, before she had taken the final step; but he had not warned himself that in spite of her bringing-up she might get used to it all and end by not resenting it any more than the rest of the professionals with whom she associated. It was this that chilled him.

'I hope I'm not interrupting your work,' he said as he sat down.

'My work?'

'I heard you studying when they let me in.'

'Oh!'

His voice sounded very indifferent, and a pause followed Margaret's mild ejaculation.