Linnet: A Romance

“You think so?” Will cried, eagerly. Her words were balm to him. Rue drew a deep sigh. “I don’t think it; I know it,” she answered, sadly.

“O Rue, how good you are,” Will murmured, with a feeling very much like remorse. “What other woman on earth but yourself would tell me so?”

Rue sighed a second time. “I saw it in her eyes,” she went on, looking hard at him still, “when first she noticed you; I saw it still more when that dreadful man Lindner came up into the box, and she waited trembling, to see what was going to happen. I watched her face; it was full of terror. But it wasn’t the loving terror of a woman who thinks the husband she adores is just about to be attacked; it was the mere physical terror of a shrinking soul at the sight of a crime, a quarrel, a scuffle. You saved that man’s life, Will; whether you know it or not, you saved it; for the other was a quarrelsome, revengeful fellow, who came there fully prepared, as Florian told us, to stab his rival. You saved his life; and when I looked at yourself, and Linnet standing by, I thought at the time what a bad turn you had done – ”

“For her?” Will suggested, in a very low tone.

“Oh no,” Rue answered aloud; “not for her alone, but for you as well – for you and her – for both of you.”

CHAPTER XXXII
WEDDED FELICITY

Signora Casalmonte scored a distinct success. She was the great dramatic and musical reality of that London season. All the world flocked to hear her; her voice made the fortune of the Harmony Theatre. She was invited everywhere – “You must have the Casalmonte,” Florian laid down the law in his dictatorial way to Belgravian hostesses – and Andreas Hausberger went always in charge, wherever she moved, to guard his splendid operatic property. And what care Andreas took of her! It was beautiful, beautiful! Unobservant people thought him a most devoted husband. He lingered always by the Signora’s side; he supplied wraps and shawls on the remotest threat of a coming chill; he watched what she ate and drank with the composite eye of a lynx and a physician; he guarded her health from the faintest suspicion of danger in any way. On off-nights, he would seldom allow her to dine out or attend evening parties; on Sundays, he took her down for change of scene and fresh air to the sea or the country. Ozone was his hobby. Every day, the prima donna drove out in the Park, and then walked for exercise a full hour in Kensington Gardens. Unobservant people set all this down to the account of the domestic affections; Will Deverill noticed rather that Andreas guarded his wife as a racing man guards the rising hope of his stables. Andreas was far too sensible a man of the world to run any needless risks with the throat of the woman who made his fortune. He had staked a great deal on her, and he meant to be repaid with compound interest.

As for London itself, it went wild about Linnet. ’Twas the Casalmonte here, the Casalmonte there; the diva will sing at Lady Smith’s to-night; the diva will go with Sir Thomas Brown and party to supper. Linnet’s head was half-turned with so much admiration; if she hadn’t been Linnet, indeed, it would have been turned altogether. But that simple childlike nature, though artistically developed and intellectually expanded, remained in emotion as straightforward and unaffected and confiding as ever. Still, that season did the best it knew to spoil her. She was queen of the situation. It rained choice flowers; diamond bracelets and painted fans showered down upon her plentifully. Linnet accepted all this homage, hardly realising its money worth; she was pleased if she gave pleasure; what others gave in return, she took as her right, quite simply and naturally. This charm of her simplicity surprised and delighted all who grew to know her; she had none of the affected airs and graces of the everyday great singer; she sang because she must; at heart she was, as always, the mountain-bred peasant-girl.

Will Deverill saw but little of her. ’Twas better so, he knew, and kinder so for Linnet. Once or twice that year, however, he supped after the theatre in the Strand with “the Hausbergers,” as he had learned to call them. On all these occasions, he noticed, Andreas watched his wife close. “One glass of champagne, Linnet; you remember, last time, when you dined at the Mowbrays’, you took two glasses, and you sang next day very much less well for it”; or else – “If I were you, Linnet, I wouldn’t touch that lobster. It disagreed with you once, and I noticed in the evening one or two of your high notes were decidedly not so clear or so sharp as usual.”

“But, Andreas,” Linnet answered, on one such occasion, “I’m sure it doesn’t hurt me. I must take something. I’ve hardly eaten a single mouthful yet, and to-night I’m so hungry.”

“It does you no harm to be hungry,” Andreas answered, philosophically. “Nobody ever reproached himself afterwards for having eaten too little. A taste of something to eat, after playing a trying part like Melinda, before you go to bed, helps you to sleep sound, and keeps you well and healthy; but a square meal at this hour can’t be good for anybody. It interferes with rest; and what interferes with rest, tells, of course, upon the voice – which is very serious. You may have a bit of that sweetbread, if you like – no; that’s a great deal too much; half that quantity, if you please, Mr Florian. Pull your woollen thing over your shoulder, so, Linnet; there’s a draught from that door! I can’t have you getting as hoarse as a frog to-night, with the Prince and Princess coming to hear you on Monday!”

“Why on earth does she stand it?” Florian asked of Will afterwards, as they walked home together down the unpeopled Strand. “I can’t make it out. There she’s earning Heaven only knows how much a night, and filling the treasury; yet she allows this fellow to bully her and badger her like this; to dictate to her how much she’s to eat and to drink; to make her whole life one perpetual torment to her. Why doesn’t she rise and strike for freedom, I wonder? He’d have to come to terms; she’s too useful to him, you see, for him to risk a quarrel with her.”

“She’s too good – that’s where it is,” Will responded, with a tinge of stifled sadness in his voice; “and, besides, she doesn’t care for him.”

“Of course she doesn’t,” Florian answered, airily. “How could she, indeed! – a mass of selfishness like him! – so mean, so sordid! But that only makes it all the stranger she should ever put up with it. If she doesn’t love him, why on earth does she permit him to dictate to her as he does – to order her and domineer over her?”

“Ah, that’s how it looks to you,” Will answered, with a sigh; “but Linnet – well, Linnet sees things otherwise. You must remember, Florian, above all things, she’s a Catholic. She doesn’t love that man, but she’s entered with him into the sacrament of marriage. To her, it has all a religious significance. The less she loves Andreas, the more does she feel she must honour and obey him, and be a good true wife to him. If she loved him, she might perhaps sometimes rebel a little; because she doesn’t love him, she has become a mere slave to do his bidding.”

“I suppose that’s it,” Florian answered, swinging his stick in his hand, and stepping along gingerly. “Drôle de croyance, isn’t it? Still, I call it disgraceful. An exquisite creature like that – a divinely-inspired singer, a supply-moulded form of Hellenic sculpture, whom the Gods above have given us as a precious gift for the common delight and the common enjoyment – to be thwarted and pulled up short at every twist and turn – and by whom, I’d like to know? Why, by a Tyrolese innkeeper – a mere village host – who arrogates to himself the right of monopolising what Heaven meant for us all – Ach! I call it detestable, just simply detestable. He hardly allows her enough to eat and drink. She might just as well be a sennerin on her hillside again, for any pleasure or delight she gets out of her success, tied and hampered as she is with this creature Hausberger.”

“That’s quite true,” Will replied. “She was happier in the Zillerthal. She has money, and fine dresses, and jewellery, and applause; but, for any good they can do her, she might as well be without them. Hausberger treats her as a mere machine for making money for him. He’s careful to see the machine works thoroughly well, and doesn’t get out of order – absurdly careful, in fact, for he’s by nature over-cautious; but as for allowing her to enjoy anything of what she earns herself, in any reasonable way – why, it never even occurs to him.”

“Do you think he’s unkind to her?” Florian asked, somewhat carelessly. “I mean, do you think he ill-treats her – keeps her short, and so forth?”

“He doesn’t actively ill-treat her, I’m sure,” Will answered with confidence; “he has far too great a sense of the value of her health to do anything to injure it. And I don’t suppose he even keeps her actually short; she’s always beautifully dressed, of course – that’s part of the advertisement; and he takes her about as much as he can, without risk to her voice, and lavishes a certain sort of wooden care upon her. But I don’t think he ever regards her as a human being at all; he regards her as a delicate musical instrument in which he has invested money, and out of which, during a given number of years, he has to recoup himself and make his fortune. As to sympathy between them, why, naturally, that’s quite out of the question; he’s a harsh, stern man who hardly knows how to be kind, I should say, to anyone.”

Florian brought down his stick on the pavement with a bang. “It’s atrocious,” he said, snorting; “I declare, quite atrocious. Here’s this exquisite creature – a banquet fit for the Gods – with her superb voice and her queenly beauty; a creature almost too ethereal for ordinary humanity to touch or handle; one that should be reserved by common consent for the delectation of the very pink and pick of the species” – and he drew himself up to his five feet nothing with a full consciousness of his own claim to be duly enrolled in that select category – “here’s this exquisite creature, who should be held in trust, as it were, for the noblest and truest and best of our kind – a Koh-i-noor among women – flung away upon a solid, stolid, three-per-cent. investing, money-grubbing, German-speaking beerhouse-keeper. Pah! It makes me sick! This Danae to a Satyr! How a Greek would have writhed at it!”

“And yet I thought,” Will murmured, reflectively, with a quiet little smile, “you considered her a cow-girl, and looked upon her as just fit for gentlemen to play skittles with!”

It took a great deal to abash Florian. He paused for a second, then he answered with warmth, “Now, there, Deverill! that’s just like you. You want me to be consistent! But the philosophic mind, as Herbert Spencer remarks, is always open to modification by circumstances. Consistency is the virtue of the Philistine intellect; it means, inability to march abreast with events, to readjust one’s ideas, one’s sympathies, one’s sentiments, to the ever-changing face of circumambient nature. When we saw Linnet first in the Tyrol, long ago, why, the girl was a cow-girl; a cow-girl she was, and a cow-girl I called her. I frankly recognised the facts of life as I found them – though I saw even then, with a voice like that, there was no perilous pinnacle of name or fame to which fate might not summon her. Now that she reappears in London once more, a flaming meteor of song, the cynosure of neighbouring eyes, a flashing diamond of the purest water, I recognise equally the altered facts. I allow that training, education, travel, the society of cultivated men and women, have practically made a brand-new Linnet of her. It’s that brand-new Linnet I admire and adore – that queen of the stage, not the Tyrolese cow-girl.”

Will turned sharp down Craven Street “And I,” he said, with a Parthian shot, “I admire and adore the real woman herself – the same Linnet still that we knew in the Zillerthal.”

Meanwhile, Andreas Hausberger, lighting a big cigar, had taken his wife down to a cab outside the supper-room.

“O Andreas!” Linnet cried, in German, “you’ve called a hansom. I can’t bear those things, you know. I wanted a four-wheeler.”

Andreas looked at her fixedly. “Get in!” he said, with curt decision. “Don’t stand and talk like that out here in the cold street, opening your throat in this foggy air after those over-heated rooms. It’s simply ridiculous. And mind you don’t knock your dress against that muddy wheel! Pick it up, I say! pick it up! You are so careless!”

“But, Andreas!” Linnet exclaimed, in an imploring tone, “I hate these hansoms so. Whenever I go in one, the horse invariably either kicks or jibs. I wish, just this once, you’d let me have a four-wheeler.”

She spoke almost coaxingly. Andreas turned to her with an angry German oath. “Didn’t I tell you to get in at once?” he cried. “Pull that thing over your shoulder. Don’t stand here chattering and catching cold all night. Jump in when I bid you. A pretty sort of thing, indeed, if you’re going to stop and discuss in a dress like that on an English evening upon these muddy pavements!” He helped her up the step, guarding her skirt with one hand, and jumped after her sulkily. “Avenue Road, St John’s Wood!” he called out through the flap to the attentive cabman. “Half-past twelve! Ach, donner-wetter! How late we’ve stayed! We’ll have to pay double fare! Have you got your purse with you?”

“Yes,” Linnet half sobbed out; “but I’ve hardly any money – not enough for the cab in it. You gave me half-a-sovereign, you know, and I paid for those gloves, and got a new bottle of that mixture at the chemist’s.”

“Only three shillings left!” Andreas exclaimed, opening the purse, and screwing his mouth up curiously. “Only three shillings left, out of a whole half-sovereign! So! London’s the dearest town for everything on earth I ever lived in. Only three shillings left! Well, that’s enough for the cab; it’s a one-and-sixpenny fare, and I rather think they double it at midnight.”

“Mayn’t I have sixpence over for trinkgeld?” Linnet ventured to inquire, in a timid voice. “When they go so far at this time of night, they always expect something.”

“No; certainly not,” Andreas answered; “why on earth should you give it to them? If you or I expect something, do other people make that any reason for giving it us? Three shillings is the legal fare; if he doesn’t like that – there’s no compulsion – he needn’t be a cabman. Three-and-sixpence indeed! why you talk as if it was water! Three-and-sixpence is a lot to spend on oneself in a single evening.”

“I should have thought so at St Valentin,” Linnet answered, softly; “but I earn so much, now. You must save a great deal, Andreas.”

“And I spent a great deal in getting you trained and educated,” Andreas retorted with a sneer. “But that’s all forgotten. You never think about that. You talk as though it was you yourself by your unaided skill who earned all the money. How could you ever have earned it, I should like to know, if I hadn’t put you in the way of getting a thorough musical training? You were a sennerin when I married you – and now you’re a lady, Signora. Besides, there’s your dress; remember, that swallows up a good third of what we earn. I say we advisedly, for the capital invested earns its share of the total just as truly as you do.”

“But, Andreas, I only want sixpence,” Linnet pleaded, earnestly. “For the poor cold cabman! I’m sure I don’t spend much – not compared with what I get; and the man looks old and cold and tired. I ought to have a shilling or two a week for pocket money. It’s like a child to have to ask you for every penny I’m spending.”

Andreas pulled out half-a-crown, which he handed her grudgingly. “There, take that, and hold your tongue,” he said. “It’s no use speaking to you. I told you before not to talk in this misty air. If you don’t care yourself whether it hurts you or not, you owe it to me, at least, after all I’ve done for you.”

Linnet leant back in her place, and began to cry silently. She let the tears trickle one by one down her cheeks. As Andreas grew richer, she thought, he grew harder and harder to her. For some minutes, however, her husband didn’t seem even to notice her tears. Then he turned upon her suddenly. “If you’re going to do like that,” he said, “your eyes’ll be too red and swollen to appear at all on Monday – and what’ll happen then, I’d like to know, Signora. Dry them up; dry them up at once, I tell you. Haven’t I given you the money?”

Linnet dried her eyes as she was bid; she always obeyed him. But she thought involuntarily of how kind Will had been, and how nicely he had spoken to her. And then – oh, then, she clasped the little Madonna hard in her fist once more, and prayed low to be given strength to endure her burden!

CHAPTER XXXIII
PLAYING WITH FIRE

And yet, Linnet was happier that first season in London than ever before since her marriage with Andreas. She knew well why. In fear and trembling, with many a qualm of conscience, she nevertheless confessed to herself the simple truth; it was that Will was near, and she felt at all times dimly conscious of his nearness. Not that she saw much of him; both she and Will sedulously avoided that pitfall; but from time to time they met, for the most part by accident; and even when they didn’t, she knew instinctively Will was watching over her unseen, and guarding her. She was no longer alone in the great outer world; she had some one to love her, to care for her, to observe her. Often, as she sang, her eyes fell on his face upturned in the stalls towards her; her heart gave a throb; she faltered and half-paused – then went on again all the happier. Often, too, as she walked in Kensington Gardens with Andreas, Will would happen to pass by – so natural for a man who lives in Craven Street, Strand, to be strolling of an afternoon in Kensington Gardens! – and whenever he passed, he stopped and spoke a few words to her, which Linnet answered in her pretty, hardly foreign English.

“How well you speak now!” Will exclaimed, one such day, as she described to him in glowing terms some duchess’s house she had lately visited.

The delicate glow that rose so readily to that rich brown cheek flushed Linnet’s face once more as she answered, well pleased, “Oh yes; I had so many reasons, you see, Herr Will, for learning it!” – she called him Herr Will even in English still – it was a familiar sound, and for old times’ sake she loved it; – then she added, half-shamefacedly, “Andreas always said it was wiser so; I should make my best fortunes in England and America.”

Will nodded, and passed on, pretending not to catch at her half-suppressed meaning; but he knew in his own heart what her chief reason was for taking so much pains to improve her English.

They saw but little of one another, to be sure, and that little by chance; though Andreas Hausberger, at least, made no effort to keep them apart. On the contrary, if ever they met by appointment at all, ’twas at Andreas’s own special desire or invitation. The wise Wirth of St Valentin was too prudent a man to give way, like Franz Lindner, to pettish freaks of pure personal jealousy. He noted, indeed, that Linnet was happiest when she saw most of Will Deverill; not many things escaped that keen observer’s vision. But when Linnet was happiest she always sang best. Therefore, Andreas, being a wise and prudent man, rather threw them together now and again than otherwise. That cool head of his never allowed anything to interfere with the course of business; he was too sure of Linnet to be afraid of losing her. It was a voice he had married, not a living, breathing woman – an exquisite voice, with all its glorious potentialities of wealth untold, now beginning to flow in upon him that season in London.

But to Linnet herself, struggling hard in her own soul with the love she could not repress, and would never acknowledge, it was a very great comfort that she could salve her conscience with that thought: she seldom saw Will save at Andreas’s invitation!

The next three years of the new singer’s life were years of rapid rise to fame, wealth, and honour. Signora Casalmonte grew quickly to be a universal favourite, not in London alone, but also in Berlin, Vienna, Paris. ’Twas a wonderful change, indeed, from the old days in the Zillerthal. Her name was noised abroad; crowned heads bowed down to her; Serene Highnesses whispered love; Archdukes brought compliments and diamond necklaces. No one mounts so fast to fame as the successful singer. She must make her reputation while she is young and beautiful. She may come from nowhere, but she steps almost at once into the front rank of society. It is so with all of them; it was so with Linnet. But to Will she was always the same old Linnet still; he thought no more of her, and he thought no less, than he had thought in those brief days of first love in the Tyrol.

At the end of Linnet’s first London season, after some weeks in Paris, when August came round, Andreas took his wife for her yearly villeggiatura to a hill-top in Switzerland. He was for ozone still; he believed as much as ever in the restorative value of mountain air and simple life for a vocalist. It gave tone to the larynx, he said, and tightened the vocal chords: for he had taken the trouble to read up the mechanism of voice production. So he carried off Linnet to an upland village perched high on the slopes behind the Lake of Thun – not to a great hotel or crowded pension, where she would breathe bad air, eat made French dishes, drink doubtful wine, keep very late hours, and mix with exciting company, but to a châlet nestling high beneath a clambering pinewood, among Alpine pastures thick with orchids and globe-flowers, where she might live as free and inhale as pure and unpolluted an atmosphere as in their own green Zillerthal. For reasons of his own, indeed, Andreas wouldn’t take her to St Valentin, lest the homesickness of the mountaineer should come over her too strong when she returned once more to London or Berlin. But he chose this lofty Bernese hamlet as the next best thing to their native vale to be found in Europe. There, for six happy weeks, Linnet drank in once more the fresh mountain breeze, blowing cool from the glaciers, – climbed, as of old, among alp and crag and rock and larch forest – felt the soft fresh turf rise elastic under her light foot as she sprang from tussock to tussock of firmer grass among the peaty sward of the hillside.

Before leaving town that summer, she had lunched once with Will at Florian’s chambers and mentioned to him casually in the course of talk the name and position of their Bernese village. Will bore it well in mind. A week or two later, as Linnet strolled by herself in a simple tweed frock and a light straw hat among the upland pastures, she saw to her surprise a very familiar figure in a grey knickerbocker suit, winding slowly along the path from the direction of Beatenberg. Her heart leapt up within her with joy at the sight. Ach, himmel! what was this? It was her Engländer, her poet! Then he had remembered where she was going; he had come after her to meet her!

Next moment, she reproached herself with a bitter reproach. The little oval Madonna, which kept its place still round her neck amid all her new magnificence, felt another hard grip on its sorely tried margin. Oh, Dear Lady, pardon her, that her heart should so jump for a stranger and a heretic – which never jumped at all for her wedded husband.

The Church knew best! The Church knew best! For her soul’s sake, no doubt, the Herr Vicar was right – and dear Herr Will was a heretic. But if only they had wedded her to Herr Will instead, – her heart gave a great thump – oh, how she would have loved him!

Though now, as things stood, of course, she could never care for him.

And with that wise resolve in her heart, and Our Lady clasped hard in her trembling hand, – she stepped forth with beaming eyes and parted lips to greet him.

Will came up, a little embarrassed. He had no intention, when he set out, of meeting Linnet thus casually. It was his design to call in due form at the châlet and ask decorously for Andreas; it made him feel like a thief in the night to have lighted, thus unawares, upon Linnet alone, without her husband’s knowledge. However, awkward circumstances will arise now and again, and we have all of us to face them. Will took her hand, a trifle abashed, but still none the less cordially. “What, Frau Hausberger!” he cried in German – and Linnet winced at the formal name, though of course it was what he now always called her; “I didn’t expect to see you here, though I was coming to ask after.. your husband in the village,” and he glanced down at his feet with a little nervous confusion.

“I saw you coming,” Linnet answered, in English, for she loved best to speak with her Engländer in his own language; “and I knew that it was you, so I came on to meet you. Isn’t it lovely here? Just like my own dear Fatherland!”

Will was hot and dusty with his long tramp from Interlaken. It was a broiling day. He sat down by Linnet’s side on the grassy slope that looks across towards the lake and the great snow-clad giants of the Bernese Oberland. That was the very first time he had been quite alone with her since she married Andreas. The very first time since those delicious mornings on the vine-draped Küchelberg. They sat there long and talked, Linnet picking tall grasses all the while with her twitching fingers, and pulling them into joints, and throwing them away bit by bit, with her eyes fixed hard on them. After a time as they sat, and grew more at home with one another, they fell naturally into talk of the old days at St Valentin. They were both of them timid, and both self-conscious; yet in the open air, out there on that Alpine hillside, it all seemed so familiar, so homely, so simple – so like those lost hours long ago in the Zillerthal – that by degrees their shyness and reserve wore off, and they fell to talking more easily and unrestrainedly. Once or twice Will even called her “Linnet,” tout court, without noticing it; but Linnet noticed it herself, and felt a thrill of strange joy, followed fast by a pang of intense remorse, course through her as she sat there.

By-and-by, their talk got round by slow degrees to London. Linnet had seen one of Will’s pieces at the Duke of Edinburgh’s, in June, and admired it immensely. “How I should love to sing in something of your composing, Herr Will,” she exclaimed, with fervour. “Just for old times’ sake, you know – when neither of us was well-known, and when we met at St Valentin.”

Will looked down a little nervously. “I’ve often thought,” he said, with a stifled sigh; “I should love to write something on purpose for you, Linnet. I know your voice and its capabilities so well, I’ve watched you so close – for your career has interested me; and I think it would inspire one, both in the lines and in the music, to know one was working for a person one – well.. one knew and liked, and.. had met before, under other circumstances.”

He looked away, and hesitated. Linnet clasped her hands in front of her between her knees, on her simple tweed frock, and stared studiously at the mountains. “Oh, that would be lovely!” she cried, pressing her fingers ecstatically. “That would be charming! that would be beautiful! I should love that I should sing in something you’d written, and, above all, in something you’d written for me, Will. I’m sure it would inspire me too – it would inspire both of us. I do not think you could write for anybody, or I could sing for anybody, as we could write and sing, each one of us, for one another. We should do ourselves justice then. Why don’t you try it?”

She looked deep into his eyes. Will quailed, and felt his heart stand still within him. “There are difficulties in the way, my child,” he answered, deliberating. “You’re more or less bound to the Harmony, I think; and I’m more or less bound to the Duke of Edinburgh’s. And then, there’s Herr Hausberger to consider as well. Even if we could arrange things with our respective managers, do you think he’d be likely to fall in with our arrangements?”

Linnet seized his arm impulsively. With these warm southern natures, such acts are natural, and mean less than with us northerners. “Oh, do try, dear Herr Will!” she exclaimed, bending forward in earnest entreaty. “Do try if we can’t manage it. Never mind about Andreas. I’m sure he would consent, if he saw it was a good piece, and I could sing in it with spirit. And I would sing in it – ach, lieber Gott, – how well I would sing in it! You would see what I could do, then! It would be splendid, splendid!”

“But I’m afraid Willdon Blades – ”

Linnet cut him short impatiently, jerking her little curled forefinger with a contemptuous gesture. “What matter about Willdon Blades!” she cried. “We can easily settle him. If you and I decide to work this play together, the manager must give in: we can arrange it somehow.” And she looked at him with more conscious dignity and beauty than usual; for, simple peasant-girl as she was, and a child still at heart, she knew by this time she was also a queen of the opera. How the gommeux had crowded her salon in her Paris hotel; how great ladies had fought for stalls at her triumphant première!

“I might think about it,” Will answered, after a brief pause, half-alarmed at her eagerness. Was it not too dangerous?

But Linnet, quite sure in her own soul she was urging him from purely artistic motives, had no such scruples. “Do try,” she cried, laying her hand impulsively on his arm once more. “Now, promise me you’ll try! Begin to-day! I should love to see what sort of a part you’d write for me.”

Will stammered, and hesitated. “Well, to tell you the truth, I’ve begun already, Linnet,” he answered, fingering the pencil-case that hung from his watch chain with ill-concealed agitation. “I’ve been walking about for a fortnight through the mountains alone – Florian wanted to come, but I wouldn’t bring him with me, that I might have time for thinking; and everything I saw seemed somehow to recall.. well, why shouldn’t I confess it? – those days on the Küchelberg. I thought of you a great deal – I mean of your voice and the sort of words and chords that would be likely to suit you. I always compose best in the open air. The breeze whispers bars to me. And I’ve begun a few songs – just your part in the play, you know – words and airs together, Wagner-wise – that’s how I always do it. The country I passed through brought the music of itself; it all spoke to me direct – and I thought it would be something new to bring this breezy Alpine air to freshen the stuffy atmosphere of a London theatre.”