And then the music had come between them. He was always at his violin and the old house echoed plaintively as in the years gone by; only as Claire grew older the wailing ceased to be fairy strains and seemed to be flowing from her own over-charged heart. Then they had suddenly sold the boarding house and gone to Berlin, where Alexis' ambitious mother had put him under one of the best masters. Followed years of traveling and recitals while the boy's fame grew and spread until the outbreak of the great war, when Alexis was fourteen and she a few months younger. They had come to the United States and made it more or less their headquarters while they toured South America, Mexico, and the West Indies. Now, at the age of twenty-three, Alexis was an idol, not only in every large city of the United States, but in Paris and London as well. Since the end of the war they had returned to the Continent several times and it was while on a visit to Paris, five or six years before, that Alexis had bought Bébé for her. How well Claire remembered it all. He had been away almost all day, playing for the wounded soldiers in Auteuil and had returned to the hotel downcast and tragic, as always after the sight of the brave poilus. She had induced him to go for a walk and had led him along the arcade in the Rue de Rivoli as people and shops always amused and distracted him. They had passed by a dog-fancier's and he had insisted upon going in and buying for her the small Brussels Griffon which stared at them with bulging and egocentric eyes from the shop window. They had been quite gay when they returned to the hotel with the new member of the family, saying they had been married and acquired progeny in the short space of an hour and a half. Mme. Petrovskey had watched them grimly, a strange look in her small eyes, and perhaps, who knows, at least Claire had always imagined that it was then that she conceived the idea of their marriage? But it was not until years after, six months ago in fact, that it had actually occurred, and then so quietly, so almost clandestinely, that it had hardly seemed like a marriage at all. Except for necessary witnesses, the small chapel had been deserted, the priest a stranger. Claire had timidly requested for old Father Gregory to officiate. But her aunt's manner had been so unapproachable that she had not dared to insist. And Alexis so unlike himself that he had scarcely spoken to her for days, barely said more than a few words, in fact, since the night she had gone to his room and Mme. Petrovskey had found her there and acted so strangely. And yet there had been nothing wrong in her going to Alexis like that. She had often done so in the years gone by, especially after a concert, when she knew it would be hours before his tension could relax into sleep. She would sit beside the bed and rub his burning forehead, and they would talk a little in soft whispers, not because they feared his mother might hear, but so as not