His hands were still on her shoulders and their eyes on each other--his with their appealing, uncertain smile, and hers unmoved, unsmiling; and suddenly that sense of danger came upon him: as if, in the mist, he felt upon him the breathing, warm, sweet, ominous, of some unseen creature. And in the fear was a strange delight, and like a hand drawn, with slow, deep pressure, across a harp, the nearness drew across his heart, stirring its one sad note--its dumb, its aching note--to a sudden ascending murmur of melody. He was caught swiftly from this inner tumult by its reflection in her face. She flushed, deeply, painfully. She drew back sharply, pushing his hands from her. Gavan sought his own equilibrium in an ignoring of that undercurrent. “Now you are not frightened; but why are you angry?” he asked. For a moment she did not speak. “Eppie, I am so sorry. What is it? You are really angry, Eppie!” Then, after that pause of speechlessness, she found words. “If I think of you as mist you must not think of me as glamour.” This she gave him straight. Only after disengaging her train from the settle, from his feet, after wheeling aside his chair to make a clear passage for her departure, did she add: “I have read your priggish Schopenhauer.” She gave him no time for reply or protestation. Quite mistress of herself, leaving him with all the awkwardness of the situation--if he chose to consider it awkward--upon his hands, very fully the finished mondaine and very beautifully the fearless and assured nymph of the hillside, she went to the piano, turned and rejected, in looking over it, some music, and sitting down, striking a long, full chord, she began to sing, in her voice of frosty dawn, the old Scotch ballad. He might go or listen as he liked. She had put him away, him and his mists, his ambiguous hold upon her, his ambiguous look at her. She sang to please herself as much as when she had gone up through the woodlands. And if the note of anger still thrilled in her voice she turned it to the uses of her song and made a higher triumph of sadness. She was still singing when the general came in. * * * * * SHE had been quite right; she had seen with her perfect sharpness and clearness indeed, and no wonder that she had been angry. He himself saw clearly, directly the hand was off the harp. It was laughably simple. He was a man, she a woman; they were both young and she was beautiful. That summed it up, sufficiently and brutally; and no wonder, again, that she had felt such summing an offense. It wasn’t in the light of such summings that she regarded herself. With him she had never, for a moment, made use of glamour. His was the rudimentary impulse, and Gavan’s sensitive cheek echoed her flush when he thought of it. Never again, he promised himself, after this full comprehension of it, should such an impulse dim their friendship. He would make it up to her by helping her to forget it.