“Is it the method?” she ventured. How young she was, he thought; how could one put it! “The method is all right,” he said, “and the voice is lovely; but how can you sing that song when you don’t know what it means,—or sing anything, when you don’t know, yet, what anything means?” Then he saw he had tried too much. Generations of convention rose up to cut off her instinct for what he was saying. “I’m afraid I don’t know what _you_ mean,” she murmured. Her eyes had fluttered fearfully from his, caught Thair’s across the room. In answer to their unconscious distress, Thair quizzically smiled. He came dawdling across to where Julia and Longacre stood, by this time conspicuously isolated. Longacre turned not too graciously to this approach, and saw that their situation had drawn another regard. Mrs. Essington, just quitted by Thair, was looking, and she too, he fancied, not without a smile. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER III MRS. ESSINGTON RUNS AWAY FROM HERSELF FLORENCE ESSINGTON woke with a flood of early sun across her bed, and the sound of the ocean in her ears. But the fringes of hardy yellow jessamine around her windows smothered the salt smell of it. The air of the room suggested gardens, and the sea sound was but a background for the clear human voices a-chatter somewhere among the hydrangeas and heliotrope. The out-of-doors invaded the house in a positive summons. A dozen retrospections had lifted and dissolved with the fog. Her veins seemed distended with fresh blood, her heart quickened with the sharp chorus of wild canaries, the chattering flights of linnets flashing across her window. She asked her reflection in the glass if a woman who appeared fresh at seven in the morning could well accuse herself of age? Her foot was like a young girl’s on the wide stair descending to the reception-hall. That sharp, exquisite freshness that a wet night leaves behind it met her on the threshold. The house stood back in the billow of a hill. The drive rushed in wide sweeps down a glittering greensward dashed with dark oaks that thickened to a belt at the base of the hill, where the road cut whitely through them; beyond, the cypresses standing up against the blue circle of sea, and the fog, a continent of pearl and shadow, stealing back across the ocean’s floor. It hid the southern horizon, but northward she could see the sunlight on the windows of Santa Cruz. She looked over the whole semicircle of sea and shore. The length of the coast, trembling out of sight in a quivering mist of spray; the unending hill and hollow, lifting and falling away into the sky; the everlasting, encompassing ocean, lifted her out of herself with their power of infinity. The sparkle of the sea drew into her eyes. The buoyant spirit of a joy that only breathes under a new-risen sun was reflected in her face.