she shook him off, saying imperiously: “Go on. I like it. It helps me to think.” Perhaps this was scarcely the comment he hoped or expected, but the repulse was passionate, not unsympathetic or chilling; and George laid his hands obediently again on the instrument with only one longing, inspiring look at the lovely, flexible face. Then he sang Beethoven’s “Adelaide,” with a strange effect. For the well-worn song was quite new to Nouna, and as it proceeded it seemed to George that the spirit of the passionate music called to her and found an answering echo, for her long black eyes grew soft and liquid, like water under the trees on a summer night, and when the last word was sung and the last note played, she lifted herself in her chair, and held out her arms in irresistible invitation. “What does the song make you feel?” he asked, whispering, with his arms round her. He began already rashly to feel assured that the low-minded sensual Rahas was wrong; she must have a soul, since she was so susceptible to fine music; than which conclusion nothing could be more futile, as a more enlarged artistic acquaintance would have proved to him. “It makes me feel that I love you,” she answered, unconsciously touching the root of many pretty fallacies concerning the noble influence of music on devotion. For if she had been better educated she would have said “it raised her, took her out of herself,” and would have delayed her illustration of the fact that it only raised her far enough to throw her in the arms of the nearest affectionately disposed person. George felt rather disappointed, having founded his ideas of women upon a ceremonious acquaintance with less ingenuous specimens of the sex. But if she was more unsophisticated than the everyday young ladies he had met, she was certainly more bewitching, and presently the thoughtful mood came over her again, and she looked up into his face with the searching expression that had shone in her eyes when she first came to him at the piano. “I have been looking at you while you played, and I have been thinking,” she said gravely. “Well, what did you think?” “I have been thinking that we shall not be happy.” George was at heart rather startled. The words echoed too strongly certain misgivings which had from time to time oppressed him in the course of the day for him not to feel that they bore some of the weight of sagacious prediction. But he would not for the world have acknowledged this to her.