For it had become clear to his intuitive sense, for all the absence of any shade of differentiation in her outward manner, that an injury had been done, and that she had felt it. Several times, on the rare and brief occasions when they had talked apart, he had warning from the same sense that she was approaching this subject; and each time he had turned the conversation with the ingenuity born of fear. Two resolutions he made. The first was that when he had completed a commissioned work which tied him to London he would go away and stay away. The strain was too great. He no longer burned to know the truth; he wanted nothing to confirm his fixed internal conviction by faith, that he had blundered, that he had misread the situation, misinterpreted her tears, written himself down a slanderous fool. He speculated no more on Marlowe’s motive in the killing of Manderson. Mr. Cupples returned to London, and Trent asked him nothing. He knew now that he had been right in those words—Trent remembered them for the emphasis with which they were spoken—“So long as she considered herself bound to him... no power on earth could have persuaded her.” He met Mrs. Manderson at dinner at her uncle’s large and tomb-like house in Bloomsbury, and there he conversed most of the evening with a professor of archaeology from Berlin. His other resolution was that he would not be with her alone. But when, a few days after, she wrote asking him to come and see her on the following afternoon, he made no attempt to excuse himself. This was a formal challenge. While she celebrated the rites of tea, and for some little time thereafter, she joined with such natural ease in his slightly fevered conversation on matters of the day that he began to hope she had changed what he could not doubt had been her resolve, to corner him and speak to him gravely. She was to all appearance careless now, smiling so that he recalled, not for the first time since that night at the opera, what was written long ago of a Princess of Brunswick: “Her mouth has ten thousand charms that touch the soul.” She made a tour of the beautiful room where she had received him, singling out this treasure or that from the spoils of a hundred bric-à-brac shops, laughing over her quests, discoveries, and bargainings. And when he asked if she would delight him again with a favourite piece of his which he had heard her play at another house, she consented at once. She played with a perfection of execution and feeling that moved him now as it had moved him before. “You are a musician born,” he said quietly when she had finished, and the last tremor of the music had passed away. “I knew that before I first heard you.” “I have played a great deal ever since I can remember. It has been a great comfort to me,” she said simply, and half-turned to him smiling. “When did you first detect music in me? Oh, of course: I was at the opera. But that wouldn’t prove much, would it?”