anyway, where folk could get at him if they wanted to?" had been the next question. Lake's answer had rather indicated that the composer was very glad to have a good stretch of ocean between himself and any "folk" who might want to get at him. This was the point at which the Lake correspondence with Charmian stood in the first week of August. His last letter lay on her knee one afternoon, as she sat in a hidden nook at the bottom of the garden, with delicate bamboos rustling in a warm south wind about her. Claude knew nothing of this exchange of letters, of all the planning and plotting. It was all for him. Some day, when the result was success, he should be told everything, unless by that time it was too late, and the steps to success were all forgotten. Charmian did nothing to disturb him. She wished him to be obsessed by the work, to do it now merely for its own sake. The result of his labors would probably be better if that were so. If Crayford did come--and he must come! Charmian was willing it every day--his coming would be a surprise to Claude, and would seem to be a surprise to Charmian. She would get rid of Claude for a few days when Lake forewarned her that their arrival was imminent; would persuade him to take a little holiday, to go, perhaps, up into the cork woods to Hammam R'rirha. He was very pale, had dark circles beneath his eyes. The incessant work was beginning to tell upon him severely. Charmian saw that. But how could she beg him to rest now, when Jernington had come out, when it was so vital to their interests that the opera should be finished as soon as possible! Besides, she was certain that even if she spoke Claude would not listen to her. Jernington, so he said, always gave him an impetus, always excited him. It was a keen pleasure to show a man of such deep knowledge what he had been doing, a keener pleasure still when he approved, when he said, in his German voice, "That goes!" And they had been trying over passages with instrumentalists who had been "unearthed," as Jernington expressed it, in Algiers. They had got hold of a horn player, had found another man who played the clarinet, the violin, and a third instrument. In fact, they were living for, and in, the opera. And Charmian, devoured by her secret ambition, had no heart to play a careful wife's part. She had the will to urge her man on. She had no will to hold him back. Afterward he could rest, he should rest--on the bed of his laurels. She smiled now when she thought of that. Presently she felt that some one was approaching her. She looked up and saw Jernington coming down the path, wiping his pale forehead with a silk handkerchief in which various colors seemed fortuitously combined. "Is the work over?" she cried out to him. He threw up one square-nailed white hand. "No. But for once he has got a passage all wrong. I have left him to correct it. He kicked me out, in fact!"