of some crashing chords. Miss Craven smiled at her eager face.

"Can you see Peter kow-towing to concert directors, and grimacing
at an audience?" she replied, rescuing a king from her rubbish
heap.

With an answering smile Gillian subsided into her former position.
Music moved her deeply and her highly strung artistic temperament
was responding to the beauty of Peters' playing. It was a Russian
folk song, plaintive and simple, with a curious minor refrain like
the sigh of an aching heart--wild sad harmony with pain in it that
gripped the throat. Swayed by the sorrow-haunted music a wave of
foreboding came over her, a strange indefinite fear that was
formless but that weighed on her like a crushing burden. The
happiness of the last few weeks seemed suddenly swamped in the
recollection of the misery rampant in the world. Who, if their
inmost hearts were known, were truly happy? And her thoughts,
becoming more personal, flitted back over the desolate days of her
own sad girlhood and then drifted to the tragedy of her father.
Then, with a forward leap that brought her suddenly to the
present, she thought of the sorrow she had seen on Craven's face
in that breathless moment at dinner time. Was there only sadness
in the world? The brooding brown eyes grew misty. A passionate
prayer welled up in her heart that complete happiness might touch
her once, if only for a moment.

Then the music changed and with it the girl's mood. She gave her
head a little backward jerk and blinked the moisture from her eyes
angrily. What was the matter with her? Surely she was the most
ungrateful girl in the universe. If there was sorrow in the world