Presently, however, Sylvia's mood of indignation burned itself out; she began to attribute the elopement of Claude and Lily to the characters they had assumed of Harlequin and Columbine, and to regard the whole affair as a scene from a play which must not be taken more deeply to heart than with the pensive melancholy that succeeds the fall of the curtain on mimic emotions. After all, what had Lily been to her more than a puppet whose actions she had always controlled for her pleasure until she was stolen from her? Without Lily she was once more at a loose end; there was the whole history of her sorrow. "I can't think what they wanted to run away for," said Jack. Sylvia fancied the flight was the compliment both Harlequin and Columbine had paid to her authority. "I don't find you so alarming," he said. "No, old son, because you and I have always regarded the Quartet from a strictly professional point of view, and consequently each other. Meanwhile the poor old Quartet is done in. We two can't sustain a program alone." Airdale gloomily assented, but thought it would be well to continue for a week or so, in case Claude and Lily came back. "I notice you take it for granted that I'll be willing to continue busking with them," Sylvia said. That evening Airdale and she went out as usual; but the loss of the other two seemed somehow to have robbed the entertainment of its romantic distinction, and Sylvia was dismayed to find with what a shameful timidity she now took herself and her guitar into saloon-bars; she felt like a beggar and was humiliated by Jack's apologetic manner, and still more by her own instinctive support of such cringing to the benevolence of potmen and barmaids.