He watched her as she wrote, and his eyes were often hard. He saw the growing haggardness in her gentle, girlish face; the wistful, puzzled expression in her dark eyes. A note of tenderness crept into his voice and remained there through all the hours they spent together. The old-time brusqueness disappeared from his speech; the sharp, authoritative tone was gone. He watched her with pity in his heart, for he knew it was ordained that one day he, too, was to hurt this loyal, pure-hearted creature even as the others were wounding her now. He frequently went out of his way to perform quaint little acts of courtesy and kindness that would have surprised him only a short time before. He sent theatre and opera tickets to Lydia and her mother. He placed bouquets of flowers at the girl's end of the desk, obviously for her alone. He sent her home--just around the corner--in the automobile on rainy or blizzardy days. But he never allowed her an instant's rest when it came to the work in hand, and therein lay the gentle shrewdness of the man. She was better off busy. There were times when he studied the face of Lydia's mother for signs that might show how her thoughts ran in relation to the conditions that were confronting all of them. But more often he searched the features of the boy who called him father. Not one of them knew that there were solemn hours in all the days when Yvonne sat shivering in her room and stared, dry-eyed and bleak, at the walls which surrounded her, seeing not them, but something far beyond. Often she sat before her long cheval-glass, either with lowering eyes or in a sort of wistful wonder, never removing her steady gaze from the face reflected there. There were other times when she stood before the striking photograph of her husband on the dressing-table, studying the face through narrowed lids, as if she searched for something that baffled, yet impressed her. Always, always there was music in the house. Behind the closed doors of his distant study James Brood listened in spite of himself to the persistent thrumming of the piano downstairs. Always were the airs light and seductive; the dreamy, plaintive compositions of Strauss, Ziehrer, and others of their kind and place. Frederic, with uncanny fidelity to the preferences of the mother he had never seen, but whose influence directed him, affected the same general class of music that had appealed to her moods and temperament. Times there were, and often, when he played the very airs that she had loved, and then, despite his profound antipathy, James Brood's thoughts leaped back a quarter of a century and fixed themselves on love-scenes and love-times that would not be denied. And again there were the wild, riotous airs that she had played with Feverelli, her soft-eyed music-master! Accursed airs--accursed and accusing!