girl sitting before the piano. Two years, two long years of exile, how could life ever make up to him for those two lost years? How he had starved! His famished eyes fed ravenously on what they saw, the supple, elastic slimness of the young body, the fine, thin ankle and shapely foot, the creamy forearm, the agile, strong, white fingers, so bravely flinging out harmonies beyond the comprehension of the smooth broad brow, inviolate, intact, innocent, ignorant, which bent its full child's curve over the keys.
Jean-Pierre looked and looked, prostrating himself in awe before the revelation of divine, stainless youth. Never till that moment, he told himself, had he understood the meaning of the holy word, virgin.
And he had thought, those two long years, that he had always held her before his eyes! He had remembered nothing, nothing of what she was. Yet, how could he have divined what she was becoming—that mouth, her pure girl's mouth, cleanly drawn in scarlet against the flowerlike flesh perfumed with youth. Would he—would he know the first cool touch of those young lips … he found that he could see her no more, for a mist before his eyes, and yet he continued to strain his eyes through the mist towards where she sat.
Some one touched him on the arm. It was Maman—Maman who looked at him in tender sympathy. As their glance met, she smiled at him, and nodded her head once, reassuringly. She looked as she had when he was a little boy, and she had yielded at last to some desperately held whim of his. Dearest Maman! It was a promise she gave him silently, a promise to help him towards his happiness. She too had succumbed to Marise. Who would not? He pressed her hand gently, and smiled in return. A calm peace came upon him.
Madame Garnier knew very well before-hand when the little American girl was to come on the program, and after that ill-bred, over-dressed Yvonne Bredier had wriggled and grinned her way off the stage, she felt an anxious, nervous expectation. Jean-Pierre had no idea what was coming. She could feel
