interposed between herself and her anxiety the obligation to dissemble it.
But the relief was only momentary, and when the first bars of the overture
turned from her the smiles of recognition among which she had tried to lose
herself, she felt a deeper sense of isolation. The music, which at another
time would have swept her away on some rich current of emotion, now seemed
to island her in her own thoughts, to create an artificial solitude in
which she found herself more immitigably face to face with her fears. The
silence, the _recueillement_, about her gave resonance to the inner
voices, lucidity to the inner vision, till she seemed enclosed in a
luminous empty horizon against which every possibility took the sharp edge
of accomplished fact. With relentless precision the course of events was
unrolled before her: she saw Dick yielding to his opportunity, snatching
victory from dishonour, winning love, happiness and success in the act by
which he lost himself. It was all so simple, so easy, so inevitable, that
she felt the futility of struggling or hoping against it. He would win the
competition, would marry Miss Verney, would press on to achievement through
the opening which the first success had made for him.

As Mrs. Peyton reached this point in her forecast, she found her outward
gaze arrested by the face of the young lady who so dominated her inner
vision. Miss Verney, a few rows distant, sat intent upon the music, in that
attitude of poised motion which was her nearest approach to repose. Her
slender brown profile with its breezy hair, her quick eye, and the lips
which seemed to listen as well as speak, all betokened to Mrs. Peyton a
nature through which the obvious energies blew free, a bare open stretch
of consciousness without shelter for tenderer growths. She shivered to
think of Dick's frail scruples exposed to those rustling airs. And then,
suddenly, a new thought struck her. What if she might turn this force to
her own use, make it serve, unconsciously to Dick, as the means of his
deliverance? Hitherto she had assumed that her son's worst danger lay in