to break the calm which was stealing over him. Time and time again Alexis had fallen asleep beneath her fingers. And so, on this particular night, when she heard the restless pacing in the room near hers, it had been purely instinctive to get up and go to his aid. And indeed he had seemed glad to see her as usual, that is until her aunt had come in upon them and ordered her out so peremptorily. She never knew exactly what passed between them, although the sound of their muffled voices had penetrated to her room for almost an hour, and she herself had not been able to sleep all night for sheer bewilderment. The next day Alexis had come to her and asked her to marry him. His face was very pale and his manner more distant than she had ever known it, not with the familiar absent-minded air behind which she knew lurked affection and kindness, but vested with a new hostile courtesy that would have struck her as sinister if she had not been too utterly dazed with joy to be analytical. Since then she had often wondered in secret, and an icy fear had invaded her at times. Could Mme. Petrovskey have had anything to do with it? Was it possible that she had forced Alexis to ask her to marry him, because she had discovered them together in his room? But if that was the case, would he not have told her about it in one of those unguarded moments when it seemed as if her love had suddenly struck flint to his steel? One of those abandoned moments when he lay in her arms with closed eyes, identity swamped in a vast surge of primitive passion? Ah, yes, he would have told her then. The alternative was too horrible to contemplate. She shuddered. The months passed like a delirious moment. Perched on a see-saw of rapture and terror, she had been flung to the heavens and then plunged into the abyss according to Alexis' moods. And he had become more eccentric every day. His passion, spasmodic from the first, had quickly degenerated into the old absent-minded kindliness at best. At times, his irritability had been frightful, but she had always excused it, attributing everything to nerves, constantly strained from excitement and overwork. Then had come his breakdown in Carnegie Hall and the collapse of the world. The doctors had sent him to a sanitarium in the mountains and all had gone well for a few weeks. Until about ten days ago when Alexis had disappeared suddenly off the face of the earth, since when Claire and his mother had existed on the verge of despair. Of course, Mme. Petrovskey had tried to keep it quiet, but it had leaked out as things always do, and the newspapers had been headlining it for the last week.