voices unsupported by the voices of men were not worth imagining at all. “Pippa passes. It is a matter of opinion.” “It is a matter of fact. These voices are without depth of foundation. What is this Pippa?” “And yet you think that women can rise higher, and fall lower, than men.” She walked home amidst the procession of scenes, grouped and blending all about her, free of their bondage to any thread of story, bathed in music, beginning their life in her as memory, set up for ever amongst her store of realities. It _had_ been a wonderful evening, opera _was_ wonderful. But the whole effect was threatened, as it stood so lovely all about her in the night air, by his insistence upon a personal interpretation, surprising her in the midst of the garden scene and renewed now as they walked, by little attempts to accentuate the relationship of their linked arms. Once more she held off the threatened obliteration. But the scenes had retreated, far away beyond the darkness and light of the visible street. With sudden compunction she felt that it was she who had driven them away, driven away the wonders that were after all his gift. If she had softened towards him, they would have gone, just the same.... It was too soon to let them work as an influence. Absurd, too, to try to invent life which did not come of itself. He had desisted and was away, fallen into his thoughtful forgetful singing, brumming out shreds of melody that brought single scenes vividly penetrating the darkness. She called him back with a busy repentance, carelessly selecting from her thronging impressions a remark that instantly seemed meaningless. “Yes” he said heartily, “there is, absolutely, something echt, kern-gesund about these old-German things.” That was it. It had all meant, really, the same for him; and he knew what it was that made the charm; admitting it, in spite of his strange deep dislike of the Germans. Kern-Gesundheit was not a sufficient explanation. But the certainty of his having been within the charm made him real, a related part of the pageant of life, his personal engaging small attribute her own undivided share. On the doorstep, side by side with his renewed silent appeal, she turned and met, standing free, his gentle tremulous salutation. For a moment the dark silent house blazed into light before her. She moved forward, as he opened the door, as into a brightness of light where she should stand visible to them both, in a simplicity of golden womanhood, no longer herself, but his Marguerite, yet so differently fated, so differently identified with him in his new simplicity, going forward together, his thoughts and visions as simple as her own in the life now just begun, from which their past dropped away grey and cold, the irrelevant experience of strangers.