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Laurence’s eyes, meeting his, changed to extreme harshness, and in a voice new to her audience—especially to Basil—she asked him to have their carriage called.

“Not before hearing Platnowsky!” remonstrated “Antinoüs.” “He is the nail of the evening—and looks it,” he added, indicating the interminable maestro, thin almost to emaciation, and topped by an exuberant mane of dull potato-colored hair, weeping-willowing across his melancholy brow. But Laurence was not attuned to humorous remarks just now, and with an impatient gesture she reiterated what might easily have been mistaken for a command, and encountered Basil’s glance of astonishment with a frown.

“She is afraid of me,” Neville thought, as with a bow he passed on toward the music-room. “Afraid of me! Can it be possible? What does she take me for?” He felt very unhappy, almost ashamed, and especially puzzled. What did it all mean? Could this haughty, overbearing woman be the same who in the grace of all her girlish beauty had spoken so tenderly to him on the moonlit lawns of Seton Park less than a year ago? He glanced helplessly around. Marguerite’s white silhouette detached itself against the lemon-wood paneling of the great salle-de-concert, and toward Marguerite he went instinctively, like all those who needed comfort, or followed the search of the ideal.