Michael went on presenting the studio with such earnestness that he himself began to endow it with a positively curative influence; but when at last Stella had reached the studio, not even caring apparently whether on the way the parlormaid saw her tears, and when she had plunged disconsolately down upon the divan, still weeping, Michael looked round at their haven with resentment. After all, it was merely an ungainly bleak whitewashed room, and Stella was crying more bitterly than before. “Look here, I say, why don’t you tell me what you’re crying about? You can’t go on crying forever, you know,” Michael pointed out. “And when you’ve stopped crying, you’ll feel such an ass if you haven’t explained what it was all about.” “I couldn’t possibly tell anybody,” said Stella, looking very fierce. Then suddenly she got up, and so surprising had been her breakdown that Michael scarcely stopped to think that her attitude was rather unusually dramatic. “But I’m damned if I _will_ give up playing,” she proclaimed; and, sitting down at the piano, forthwith she began to play into oblivion her weakness. It was a very exciting piece she played, and Michael longed to ask her what it was called, but he was afraid to provoke in her any renewal of self-consciousness; so he enjoyed the fiery composition and Stella’s calm with only a faint regret that he would never know its name and would never be able to ask her to play it again. When she had finished, she swung round on the stool and asked him what had happened to Lily Haden. “I don’t know—really—they’ve left Trelawny Road,” he said, feeling vaguely an unfair flank attack was being delivered. “And you never think of her, I suppose?” demanded Stella. “Well, no, I don’t very much.” “Yet I can remember,” said Stella, “when you were absolutely miserable because she had been flirting with somebody else.” “Yes, I was very miserable,” Michael admitted. “And you were rather contemptuous about it, I remember. You told me I ought to be more proud.” “And don’t you realize,” Stella said, “that just because I did remember what I told you, I made my effort and began to play the piano again?” Michael waited. He supposed that she would now take him into her confidence, but she swung round to the keyboard, and when she had finished playing she had become herself again, detached and cool and masterful. It was incredible that the wet ball of a handkerchief half hidden by a cushion could be her handkerchief.