The musician's voice became husky, whether from self-pity, or from the recollection of the poor little scared face of the child who had found her happiness only to lose it again, it would be impossible to say. "Women are such deuced odd things," continued the musician, complainingly; "they expect you to look on while they scratch one another's eyes out, and then if you touch a hair of their heads you have the whole lot of them against you. Bless her! I would give my life to undo what I have done to her to-day." Which did he mean? Perhaps he hardly knew. But Lady Joan did all the while that she sat by Norah Bisley on the horse-hair sofa, downstairs in the oak-panelled parlor. The child stirred in his sleep. "Happy Sonny," murmured the musician, sentimentally, "your turn has yet to come. Why can't children always remain children? Norah ought never to have grown up; she was meant for eternal childhood. It was a mistake to make Lady Joan a child at all, she ought to have been born a full-grown woman. _I_ ought never to have been born at all, of course. Who arranges these things?" Then he went to the table by the window, and cleared it of Sonny's monkey without a tail, and the fat pink pin-cushion, and the pale green glass pot with a lid, and the shining porcelain shepherdess with a chipped crook, and the knitted toilet-cover that entrapped the legs of all these ornaments, and sat down to write the best song he had ever composed, to some words by George Meredith. "Men are always brutes," said Lady Joan, "but this one has only become so by accident. Stupid people do more harm than bad ones, ever so much. The fates will help you out of a hole if you have been a clever sinner, but they will lay a pitfall for you if you are a blundering, good-intentioned sort of creature. The fact is, this world of ours was made for clever people, and the fools haven't a chance. That is why he has gone wrong." "Is he a fool then?" asked the weary voice on the sofa. One disillusionment more than another did not matter now that her idol was broken. "He lives by his emotions, and he has no sense of proportion. It comes to the same thing. He had no intention of being faithless to you, and if you had not gone away he would have married you, and remained dull and virtuous to the end of his days. But you did go away, and I came home; and he can't live without a woman, and so he persuaded himself that his friendship for me was love. That was how it was done. Perhaps I encouraged him too. He was interesting to me, and he was never in love with me, so I amused myself by trying to fascinate him. I can't help being a woman." "Are women like that too?" thought the other, and she added out loud, "I am a woman too, but--" and left her sentence unfinished. "No, you are not a woman, you are only a child," said Lady Joan; "the world is a place for you to play in. You were born to be happy, and you will never have to realize the things I have been telling you."