"May I turn your music?" he asked eagerly, but she shook her head as she moved away. "There isn't going to be any music to turn." She began to sing the same little Roumanian song that he remembered on their last evening in the Lenox house, and his spirits, lifted for a moment by her smile, went down again. "Into the mist I gazed and fear came on me, Then said the mist, 'I weep for the lost sun.'" She sang passionately and he could have cried aloud. It was true then that she was grieving for Dick. "The music is uncanny, isn't it?" she said, as she ended and found him near her. "How does it make you feel?" "If I should find an image for my feelings just at present, you would scorn me for my base material thoughts." "Find it," she commanded. "I think I feel like a mince-pie--a maddening jumble of things delicious and indigestible." She laughed and grew friendly. This, he thought, is, after all, her permanent mood; but before he could take advantage of it another caller, Mr. Early, appeared; and again she basely deserted Norris to the mercies of her father and mother, and devoted herself to the evident beatification of the apostle of the new in art. CHAPTER XIV THE RETURN OF RAM JUNA One gloomy evening in January Mr. Early sat alone. He had so many tentacles spread out through the world of men and women that solitude was unusual to him. Indeed it had often occurred to him, as an example of the fallacy of ancient sayings, that there was nothing in that old epigram about the loneliness of the great. The higher he had risen in the scale of greatness the more insistently and persistently had the world invaded his life, until even his appreciation of solitude had atrophied. This particular day had been a hard one. The problems of glass and rugs were unusually complicated, and the interruptions to continuous thought more numerous than usual. Moreover, without warning, like a meteor of magnificent proportions, Swami Ram Juna, with many paraphernalia of travel, had suddenly reappeared to ask for that once-proffered hospitality. Not without state and courtesy could such a being be welcomed; and courtesy takes time. Finally, to discuss the matter of the outer cover for the next issue of _The Aspirant_, a henchman invaded his privacy. Sebastian looked over a pile of designs, and chose a flat but lurid young woman, in a sphinx-like attitude against a background of purple trees. Then came the more difficult question of an aphorism to be printed on the table against which the lurid young woman leaned. It was the habit of _The Aspirant_ to convey, even on its outside, wisdom to the world, and the thinking up of smart young aphorisms is not always an easy task. Mr. Early at length evolved: "It has been said of old: 'Know thyself.' I say unto thee, 'Forget thyself. Know thy brother.'"