have to go upon. In this narrative, as we tell it now, that story is known only to its chief actor, and to her old friend who is now dining at the Hurkaru Club.
The third movement of Op. 999 was not a very long one, and, coming to an end at this point, seemed to supply a reason for silence that was not unwelcome in the back drawing-room. The end of a trying conversation had been attained. Both speakers could now affect attention to what was going on in the front. This had taken the form of a discussion between Mr. Julius Bradshaw and Miss Lætitia Wilson, who was anxious to transfer her position of first violin to that young gentleman. We regret to have to report that Miss Sally's agreement with her friend about the desirability had been sotto voce'd in these terms: "Yes, Tishy dear! Do make the shop-boy play the last movement." And Miss Wilson had then suggested it, saying there was a bit she knew she couldn't play. "And you expect me to!" said the owner of the Strad, "when I haven't so much as looked at it for three years past." To which Miss Sally appended a marginal note, "Stuff and nonsense! Don't be affected, Mr. Bradshaw." However, after compliments, and more protestations from its owner, the Strad was brought into hotchpot, and Lætitia abdicated.
"Won't you come and sit in here, to be away from the music?" said the back-drawing-room. But Lætitia wanted to see Mr. Bradshaw's fingering of that passage. We are more interested in the back drawing-room.
Like many other athletic men—and we have seen how strongly this character was maintained in Fenwick—he hated armchairs. Even in the uncomfortable ones—by which we mean the ones we dislike—his restless strength would not remain quiet for any length of time. At intervals he would get up and walk about the room, exasperating the sedate, and then making good-humoured concession to their weakness. Mrs. Nightingale could remember all this in Gerry the boy, twenty years ago.
If it had not been for that music, probably he would have walked about the room over that stiff problem in dates he had just grappled with. As it was, he remained in his chair to solve it—that is, if he did solve it. Possibly, the moment he saw something
important turned on the date of Sally's birth, he jumped across the solution to the conclusion it was to lead to. Given the conclusion, the calculation had no interest for him.
But the story his mind constructed to fit that conclusion stunned him. It knitted his brows and clenched his teeth for him. It made the hand that had been hanging loose over the uncomfortable chair-back close savagely on something—a throat, perhaps, that his imagination supplied? How like he looked, thought his companion, to himself on one occasion twenty years ago! But his anger now was on her behalf alone; it was not so in that dreadful time she hoped he might never recollect. If only his memory of all the past might remain as now, a book with a locked clasp and a lost key!
She watched him as he sat there, and saw a calmer mood come back upon him. Each wanted a raison d'être for a silent pause, and neither was sorry for the desire each might ascribe to the other of hearing the last movement of the music undisturbed. Op. 999 was prospering, there was no doubt of it! Lætitia Wilson was a very fair example of a creditable career at the R.A.M. But she was not quite equal to this unfortunate victim of a too nervous system, who could play like an angel for half an hour, mind you—not more. This was his half-hour; and it was quite reasonable for Fenwick to take for granted that his hostess would like to pay attention to it, or vice-versa. So both sat silent.
But as she sat listening to Op. 999, and watching wonderingly the strange victim of oblivion, of whom she knew—scarcely acknowledging it always, though—that she had once for a short time called him husband, her mind went back to an old time when he and she were young: before the tragic memory that she sometimes thought might have been lived down had come into her life and his. And a scene rose up before her out of that old time—a scene of young men, almost boys, and girls who but the other day were in the nursery, playing lawn-tennis in a happy garden, with never a thought for anything in this wide world but themselves, and each other, and the scoring, and how jolly it would be in the house-boat at Henley to-morrow. And then this garden-scene a little later in the moonrise, and herself and one of the players, who was Gerry—this very man—left