His big chest heaved under the soft fabric of his shirt as he stood looking down at her, waiting for her answer.

She would have given the world to be able to answer him with a simple “No.”  But her lips refused to shape the word.  There was so much that lay between them, so much that was complicated and difficult to interpret.

Slowly her eyes fell before his.

“I utterly decline to answer such a question,” she replied at last.  “It’s an insult.”

His hands fell from her shoulders.

“I think I’m answered,” he said curtly, and, turning on his heel, he strode away, leaving Nan shaken and dismayed.

As far as Maryon was concerned, he refrained from making any allusion to what had taken place that day in the music-room, and gradually the sense of shocked dismay with which his proposal had filled Nan at the time, grew blurred and faded, skilfully obliterated by his unfailing tact.  But the remembrance of it lingered, tucked away in a corner of her mind, offering a terrible solution of her difficulties.

He still demanded from her a large part of each day, on the plea that much yet remained to be done to the portrait, while Roger, into whose ears Isobel continued to drop small poisoned hints, became correspondingly more difficult and moody.  The tension of the situation was only relieved by the comings and goings of Sandy McBain and the enforced cheerfulness assumed by the members of the Mallow household.

Neither Penelope nor Kitty sensed the imminence of any real danger.  But Sandy, in whose memory the recollection of the winter’s happenings was still alive and vivid, felt disturbed and not a little anxious.  Nan’s moods were an open book to him, and just now they were not very pleasant reading.

“What about the concerto?” he asked her one day.  “Aren’t you going to do anything with it?”

“Do anything with it?” she repeated vaguely.

“Yes, of course.  Get it published—­push it!  You didn’t write it just for fun, I suppose?”

A faintly mocking smile upturned the corners of her mouth.

“I think Roger considers I wrote it expressly to annoy him,” she submitted.

“Rot!” he replied succinctly.  “Just because he’s not a trained musician you appear to imagine he’s devoid of ordinary appreciation.”

“He is,” she returned.  “He hates my music.  Yes, he does”—­as Sandy seemed about to protest.  “He hates it!”

“Look here, Nan”—­he became suddenly serious—­“you’re not playing fair with Trenby.  He’s quite a good sort, but because he isn’t a scatter-brained artist like yourself, you’re giving him a rotten time.”

From the days when they had first known each other Sandy had taken it upon himself at appropriate seasons to lecture Nan upon the error of her ways, and it never occurred to her, even now, to resent it.  Instead, she answered him with unwonted meekness.