"To live day by day," she said slowly, her fingers playing with a necklace that hung about her full white throat, "near a soul like Basil's, to commune with a brain like his ... to feel the inspiration of his nature that is so in tune with the beauty of the world, is a happiness few women can experience. If it were not too cruel, I could feel thankful for his wound that has given him so completely to me." I stood by her on the creaking stairs as the rain swept in torrents against the house, and her murmuring tones mingled with the sounds of the storm. "Perhaps you cannot understand," she said gently, "but loving Basil as I do, and having him dependent on me, is a selfish happiness that only a woman could really know." And out of the night a truth came to me that, though it never, never could be mine, the most precious thing in this world is a woman's heart. XIV It was eleven o'clock, and Basil Norman and I were alone. The storm had subsided, and, through the sound of the rain, we could hear the waves breaking against the shore. "I do not want Siegfried to go to school yet," he was saying; "he is so full of promise and latent genius that I dread the risk of having it all standardized into what we call a public-school man. I am coaching him in languages and the three R's, but more than anything else I want him to form his own conception of the scheme of the universe, so that when he takes his position among the world's musicians--as I am confident he will--he'll have the echo of what he interprets in his own breast. Music is so vast, yet musicians, as a class, are people of little depth." "Has the lad a chance in England with his German name?" "Yes. England must realize that genius has no nationality." "What was Siegfried like when you took him first?" "He was arrogant, sullen, and in his child's brain was the knowledge that his father had fought against us. To make him forget his unhappy past, and partly to satisfy a caprice of my own, I--well, you would say I blew bubbles. We invented a little city of make-believe. From the hill at the back of the house you can look down on all these houses, and at dusk, when the mist rises from the sea and the windows begin to glow with light, it is quaint enough for a study by Rackham. In our little City of Bubbles there dwelt such celebrities as Aladdin, Jack the Giant Killer, Midshipman Easy, Peter Pan, poor Wilde's Happy Prince, and Heaven knows how many more. They were very real to Siegfried and me, and Lilias used to have many a laugh over the troubles of our little family. But I had not counted on Sindbad; he was filling Siegfried with stories of buried treasure and men forced to walk the plank (all of them absolutely authenticated by the narrator), and the lurking Prussian began to appear. He stole down to Ventnor and bought books on the war ... he began to glory in the stand Germany was making. So I was not surprised when, one day, he suggested that we should play soldiers.