She could not answer the question. Her love for him had become so much a part of her life she could not imagine living without it. She wondered if women could continue loving men who had treated them as he had treated her. When she thought over his treatment of her she wondered how it was that she did not hate him. She had heard of love turning to hatred--hatred as immortal as love--and yet it did not appear to her that she had such a feeling in regard to him. She seemed to have settled down into her life under its altered conditions as easily and as uncomplainingly as it she had always looked forward to life under such conditions. It was on the eve of Claude Westwood's departure for London to appear before the Geographical Society, that Clare sat down to the piano. She had latterly neglected her singing in favour of her drawing, and now only opened the piano at the request of Agnes. “What shall I sing?” she cried. “I feel just now as if I could make a great success at La Scala--I feel that my nerves are strung to the highest pitch possible, though why I should be so is a mystery to me. It is not I who have to appear in that big hall to-morrow evening, and yet I feel as if I were about to make my _début_.” She ran her fingers up and down the keys, improvising a succession of chords that sounded like a march of triumph. “I want to sing something like that--something with trumpets in it,” she said, with a laugh. “I feel in a mood for trumpets and drums. You heard what Mr. Westwood said about the musical instruments of the Gakennas--that awful drum made of rhinoceros hide pared down and stretched between two branches? What an awful instrument of torture!” “Shocking, indeed--nearly as bad as a pianoforte under incompetent hands--probably worse than a brass orchestra made in Germany,” said Agnes. “Don't let your song be dominated by any influence less cultured than Chopin.” Clare went on improvising, but gradually the notes of triumph became less pronounced, and the modulation was in a minor key. In a short time the random fancies assumed a definite form; but it was probably the chance playing of a few notes that suggested to her the exquisite “Nightingale” theme, so splendidly worked out by her master--the greatest of all Italians. “You and I, you and I, Sisters are we, O nightingale. On the wings of song we fly-- On the wings of song we sail; When our feathered pinions fail, Floats a feather of song on high Light as thistledown in a gale. You and I the heaven will scale; For only song can reach the sky. Only the song of the nightingale; And we are sisters, you and I.”