help feeling it for any one you loved.  Paula, bending over that furry faun-like head, reading off the same score with him, responding to the same emotions from the music....  Fantastic, of course.  There could be no sane doubt as to who it was that Paula was in love with.  That embrace of hers, just now.  Curious how it terrified him.  He had felt like a mouse under the soft paw of a cat.  An odd symptom of fatigue.

What a curious thing life was.  How widely it departed from the traditional patterns.  Here in his own case, that Fate should save the one real passion of his life for the Indian summer of it.  And that it should be a reciprocated passion.  The wiseacres were smiling at him, he supposed; smiling as the world always smiled at the spectacle of infatuate age mating with tolerant, indifferently acquiescent youth.  Smiled and wondered how long it would be before youth awoke and turned to its own.  Well, he could afford to smile at the wiseacres.  And at the green inexperienced young, as well, who thought that love was exclusively their affair—­children the age of Mary taking their sentimental thrills so seriously!

Four years now he had been married to Paula and the thing had never chilled,—­never gone stale.  How different from the love of his youth that had led to his former marriage, was this burning constant flame.  Paula was utterly content with him.  She had given up her career for him.—­No.  She hadn’t done that.  He had not asked her to do that.  Had not, on the contrary, her marriage really furthered it?  Was she not more of a person to-day than the discouraged young woman he had found singing for pittances the leading dramatic soprano roles in the minor municipal operas of Germany and Austria?  Wasn’t that what she had said this morning—­that falling in love with him was the best thing that could possibly have happened to her?  He had taken it wrong when she said it, as if she were regarding him just as an instrument that served her purpose, a purpose that lay beyond him; outside him.

That was what had given him that momentary pang of terror.  Fatigue, of course.  He ought to go to sleep.  Paula was refraining from her morning practise just so that he could.  Or was that why?  Was she dreaming, up in the music room where she was never to be disturbed,—­of last night—­of Novelli?  Damnation....

CHAPTER II

SEA DRIFT

Paula went up to the music room after breakfast, stood at one of its open windows for a few minutes breathing in the air of an unusually mild March and then abruptly left it; dressed for the street and went out for a walk.

She was quite as much disturbed over the scene in the dining-room as her husband had been.  His flash of jealousy over the little Italian pianist, instantly recognizable through its careful disguise, had only endeared John Wollaston to her further, if that were possible.  She had laughed and hugged his worried old head tight against her breast.