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 "Yes."

"He's a nice boy, isn't he?"

"A very nice boy."

After a silence he asked, "What's the name of the thing he's playing?"

Olivia could not help smiling. "It's called I'm in love again and the spring is a-comin'. Jean brought it back from Paris. A friend of his wrote it . . . but names don't mean anything in music any more. No one listens to the words."

A shadow of amusement crossed his face. "Songs have queer names nowadays."

She would have escaped, then, going quietly away. She stirred and even made a gesture toward leaving, but he raised his hand in the way he had, making her feel that she must obey him as if she were a child.

"There are one or two more things you ought to know, Olivia . . . things that will help you to understand. Some one has to know them. Some one. . . ." He halted abruptly and again made a great effort to go on. The veins stood out sharply on the bony head.

"It's about her chiefly," he said, with the inevitable gesture toward the north wing. "She wasn't always that way. That's what I want to explain. You see . . . we were married when we were both very young. It was my father who wanted it. I was twenty and she was eighteen. My father had known her family always. They were cousins of ours, in a way, just as they were cousins of Sabine's. He had gone to school with her father and they belonged to the same club and she was an only child with a prospect of coming into a great fortune. It's an old story, you see, but a rather common one in our world. . . . All these things counted, and as for myself, I'd never had anything to do with women and I'd never been in love with any one. I was very young. I think they saw it as a perfect match . . . made in the hard, pros-