After a time she stopped playing, with one dissatisfied, disordered chord, then there was a little pause which she broke by singing, first softly and half humming, then she seemed to awaken with a start, and she sang on, song after song, with a sort of excited vehemence. Her voice was a low contralto, there was not a sharp nor a hard tone in it, but there were some strong harsh ones, like the groans of men, and some deep guttural ones, like the sighs of women; there was no passion in her voice, but it was full of consuming soft tumults of vague sad unrest. “This is rather a pleasanter modification of her first storms!” thought Strange. “What possibilities there are in that voice, I wonder what would happen if I went over and tried to kiss that dead woman into life! Pygmalion’s task was a fool to mine, what’s marble to an undeveloped woman!” He stood behind her and joined in with her song, his bass to her contralto. The combination gave one rather a shock at first, but it grew fascinating as they went on. Gwen stopped suddenly in the middle of a song. “I could not have believed our two voices could ever mix and make completeness.” “It is a ‘sport’.” “I like explicable things best,” she said, peering out into the semi-gloom. “You go about with a scalpel in your brain, Gwen! What a thing it is to come of scientific stock!” “Oh, it’s a diabolical thing for a woman!” said Gwen. She shut the piano up softly—she never by any chance banged things—and went upstairs to dress. “I shall wear that silk that looks like flesh,” she said. “I put it away your ladyship, you said you did not like it.” “If you could get at it quite easily, I should like to wear it to-night.” “That dress suggests good sound flesh and blood, with no remote divinity about it,” she thought. “Oh, I wish I could let things be, and stop poking about among mysteries. I will touch him to-night, yes, I will. I wonder—I wonder—if I can possibly muster up strength for a kiss.” CHAPTER XXX. MRS. FELLOWES, meanwhile, was having a most unsatisfactory time with the Park people; it seemed absolutely impossible to dig into them or to be of any service to them. They were wearing her to skin and bone, and she was meditating a change somewhere or other, when one day, crossing the hall just after lunch, she heard a knock at the door and opened it herself. She found Mr. and Mrs. Waring standing in their normal attitude and looking frightfully embarrassed; she saw at a glance that they looked queerer than usual, and not feeling equal just at that minute to face them alone, she carried them straight off to the dining-room. “Ah, the _Nineteenth Century_, I perceive,” said Mr. Waring as soon as he found himself in a chair, with his hat grasped in one hand and the other on the edge of his knee with the fingers stretched out and feeling nervously in a baulked way.