upon her a blanched and stricken face out of which two beautiful haunted
eyes stared like living terrors--terrors of memory, of silence, of the
unseen which had taken visible forms.

"Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!" cried Angela breathlessly, raising her
quivering hands to her ears. "I have heard it before! I have heard
it--long before!"

She paused, gasping, and without a word Laura turned and ran down the
dark staircase, while with each step the air that Uncle Percival played
sounded louder in her ears.

The door of the library was open, and as she entered she called out in a
voice that held a sob of anger, "Uncle Percival, how could you?"

His attentive, deafened ears were for his music alone, and, letting the
flute fall from his hands, he turned to look at her with the pathetic,
innocent enquiry of a good but uncomprehending child. At the sight of
his smiling, wrinkled face, his gentle blue eyes and the wistful droop
of disappointment at the corners of his mouth, her indignation changed
suddenly to pity. It seemed to her that she saw all his eighty years
looking at her from that furrowed face out of those little wandering
round blue eyes--saw the human part of him as she had never seen it
before--with its patience of unfulfilment, its scant small pleasures,
its innocent senile passion at the end; saw, too, the divine part,
hidden in him as in all humanity--that communion of longing which bound
his passionate fluting, Angela's passionate remorse and her own
passionate purity into the universal congregation of unsatisfied souls.

The sharp words died upon her lips and, kneeling at his side, she took