CHAPTER I.

"Maccaroni of my native land!" said Signor Luigi one day whilst sitting in Katharine's private room at the organ-factory--"Maccaroni of my native land! And so the Signorina have become a real business-personage, helping 'brother' to build the best organs in the world. But the Signorina must not work too hard. She must not depart the roses from her cheeks. And she must eat her lunch lentissimo largissimo, as now. Ha, this coffee is very good. And the rolls and butter is adorable."

Katharine laughed, and poured out another cup of coffee for the merry little Italian.

"No," he repeated, "she must not depart the adorable roses from her cheeks."

"Oh, I am not too tired," Katharine said. "Of course it was a little trying at first to get accustomed to routine work. But after a time it goes swimmingly, Signor Luigi; and I assure you I should be quite lost now if I did not come down to the factory every day. Let me see. I have been at it three months. You all said I should give it up after three days."

"We all thought the Signorina were made to have all the time to herself and to command her faithful servants," the little violoncellist answered gallantly.

"But I can still command my faithful servants, I suppose?" Katharine asked with a smile.

"Always, always!" he replied, waving his spoon in the air.

"You see," Katharine continued, nodding at him approvingly, "I was bent on filling up my life with something which was worth doing. Even before I left England, I had got tired of the ordinary leisured woman's life. And when I came home again and went amongst my friends and acquaintances, I saw it was going to be impossible to me to take such a life up once more and even pretend to myself that I was enjoying it. The whole thing bored me, wearied me. But here I am not bored. Moreover, I am delighted with myself, and proud to find myself developing all sorts of unexpected abilities!"

"I have always said that the Signorina have the abilities of all the cleverest and beautifullest personages in all the centuries and all the countries," said Signor Luigi. "Light of mine eyeballs, light of mine eyeballs! I have always said she could build organs for 'brother,' play on the trombone, on the adorable drums, do anything and everything--except one thing."

"And what is that?" Katharine said.

"The Signorina could not leave off being her adorable self although she have become the busy, busy business-personage," he answered, with a nourish of the coffee-cup. "But now I go. I dare not stay one leetle minute longer. I have not the wish to be deported like the Pomeranian dog. Ah, he have gone away with the other grand things of 'brother's' grand house. But 'brother' looks happier. And every month 'brother' will be happier. Not so many illustrious expenses, not so much animato agitato of the spirits! I know. I am calmer since I cut down the half of my native maccaroni. For the times is bad, Signorina. No one is pining himself to learn the violoncello or listen to it. No, he prefer to dash away in a motor-car, and the poor musician--well, he must cut down his maccaroni and play to himself and give lessons to himself. Or he must change his profession and be motor-car driver. I have the serious thoughts about it, Signorina. But I will not drive you and 'brother' till I have practised on other people. Ha, here is 'brother.'"

Ronald came in looking pleased.

"We have got the order for that organ in Natal," he said, nodding to Signor Luigi. "I am awfully glad about it. Don't go, Luigi."

"Noble 'brother,' I must go," the little Italian answered. "I have a pupil at twelve o'clock, and it is now two. She go out in the motor-car, and I allow her three whole hours for being late for her lesson. Ah, the times has indeed changed. The enthusiasms has gone to sleep. Never mind. Vive le quartette! Remember, 'brother,' there is a meeting next week at Herr Edelhart's, and an audience of one is expected."

He looked at Katharine as he spoke, put his hand to his heart, and was gone. But he returned immediately, and added:

"Monsieur Gervais begged the Signorina would be careful not to get the brain fevers over her hard work. He will come next week to pay his compliments. He says he now has the inflammations of the lungs himself."

Ronald, left alone with Katharine, put his hand on her arm.

"Kath," he said gently, "you must not work too hard. You are looking tired. I know well that my shameful behaviour has ploughed into you awfully. You have been a brick to me, old girl. You shall never regret that you stood by me with your money and your kindness. I shall never forget how you hurried back from Norway, and came to the rescue, and saved me and the good name of the firm. I can't say much about it to you now, for I am still too ashamed. But----"

"We went through bad times, Ronald, you and I and Gwendolen," Katharine answered; "but we are coming out of it with our chins well up in the air and a better understanding in our hearts. I had lost you, Ronnie; but I have found you again. I had never won Gwendolen, but--but I am winning her. And there is nothing to thank me for. This crisis in your affairs was my salvation. I never forget that. There are other crises than business crises, Ronnie. And I have been very thankful to turn away from inner troubles to outside difficulties. I begin to see why life is far easier to men than to women. The fight with the outer world braces men up. They go forth, and pass on strengthened. But the women are chained to circumstance--or chain themselves."

"You are in trouble, Kath, and have not told me?" he asked reproachfully.

"There was nothing to tell, dearest," she said, touched by his old loving manner.

"In the old days you would have told me that nothing," he said sorrowfully.

She looked up from the letters which she had suddenly begun to arrange. There were tears in her eyes. There was a grey sadness spread over her face. She was not the old Katharine of a few months ago.

"Kath," he said, "I have been thinking only of myself. I have not been noticing. But I see you are in trouble. May not a selfish fellow know even at the eleventh hour?"

She shook her head as she took his hand and fondled it.

"Some day, Ronnie," she said, almost in a whisper; "not just now."

She could not tell him. She could not tell any one. She owed it to her own self-respect, her own wounded pride, to keep silent about Clifford Thornton's strange silence to her. When she had left the Gaard, she had come home by the overland route, _viâ_ Copenhagen and Hamburg. At Hamburg she had rested for a few hours, and in the hotel facing the lake she had written to Clifford. She poured her whole heart, all her longing and love, all her understanding tenderness into that letter. She wrote it feverishly, with emotional abandonment of all restraint. She loved him, believed in him, and what she could not tell him face to face up at Peer Gynt's stue she told him in that letter. And she received no answer to it. More than three months had passed since she wrote it, and still no sign had come from him, no signal across the vast, nothing. She had offered all she could offer, her best self--and his answer was silence. She suffered. She did not regret her impulsiveness. Throughout her life Katharine had been willing to take the consequences of her emotional temperament. She had never shrunk from paying the due price exacted by life from those who do not pause to think and weigh. Nevertheless her heart was chilled, her pride was wounded. But she said to herself time after time that she would not willingly have written one sentence, one word less. She was impelled to write that letter in that way. No other way would have been possible to her. But she believed that, from his point of view, she had said too much, let herself go too far, frightened the reserved man, lost his respect perhaps, touched him perhaps too roughly on the painful wounds which the chances of life had inflicted on him.

It was great good luck for her that she had work to do, and pressing matters and anxieties which demanded her time and intelligence. She turned herself into a business woman with that remarkable adaptability which men are only beginning to recognise and appreciate in the other sex. From her pretty flat across the water she sallied forth day after day to the organ-factory. The manager and the workmen welcomed her. They were willing to teach her. She was willing to learn. Her quick brain dealt with difficulties in a surprising fashion. Mr Barlow, the manager, had always believed in her business capacities; and it was encouraging to her to know that he was not disappointed. Moreover, she had stepped into the thick of things at a serious crisis, and by her generous action had safeguarded the honour and position of the firm; for she had sold out many of her own investments to meet Ronald's Stock Exchange debts, which otherwise might have been enforced against him as a partner of the firm. She had covered up his extravagant recklessness and his indifferent husbanding of their united interests. She knew that he had yielded to dishonourable recklessness as many another man had yielded before--for love of, and at the importunity of, a woman. She knew that as the months had gone on, he must have been increasingly harassed and torn between his passionate love for Gwendolen and his own natural feelings of what was upright in his business relationships. She was very pitiful with him: yearning as a mother over him. But on one point she was adamant. Ronald had sent Gwendolen to rich friends in the North. Katharine insisted that she should return and take her part at once in Ronald's altered circumstances; for the luxurious house in South Kensington had to be given up, and a more modest home sought for and found in Chelsea. Ronald fought this. He wished to spare his goddess.

"She has never been accustomed to having things in a small way," he said.

"Then she must learn," Katharine answered determinedly.

"You are hard on your own sex," Ronald had said, stung by her decided manner.

"I believe in my own sex," Katharine replied, flushing. "Most women are bricks, Ronnie, if men will allow them to be so. You men make fools of women in the early days of your passionate love, and then later, when it is too late, expect them to behave as sane and reasonable human beings. Gwendolen must come, and at once."

It was in vain that he pleaded.

"She is so young and beautiful, Kath, and she is having such a happy time up North," he said. "I cannot bear to bring her back to worries."

"She must come," Katharine answered.

So Gwendolen came rustling back in her silks and satins, and astonished every one, including herself, by her delighted behaviour.

"Dear old Kath!" she said. "You did not think I was a monster of selfishness and iniquity, but believed in me. You will see how fearfully economical I shall be in the future. I shall sell all my jewels, dress in brown holland, and take in all the darning of the neighbourhood!"

So Katharine had reason to be a little comforted. If she had lost some joys in life, she had gained others.

But she fretted. She had not much leisure, but in her spare time she went down to the Natural History Museum and hung over the cases in the Mineral Department. That was a mournful sort of consolation to her: to be where she had been with Clifford. Once or twice she started off to see Alan. But she turned back. If the father had given no sign, it was not fitting for her to seek out the boy. Several times she wrote long letters to Knutty, and tore them up. The letters she did send to Knutty contained no allusion to Clifford. When the old Dane read them, she said, "Great powers! Is she becoming an iceberg too, or am I mad?"

She sat constantly in the Abbey. She listened to the organ, to the singing. She thought of the gracious day in the summer when Clifford and she had passed along by the glacier-river, and stopped to rest in the old brown church where they sat silently. There was no organ. There was no singing. The music was in their own hearts.

One day she met Herr Edelhart in the Poet's Corner. He was looking grave.

"Yes," he said, "the times are wunderbar bad for great souls, great artistes like mineself. No one wishes to hear me play. And, lieber Himmel, when I think of it, what a tone I have! In this Abbey I could make my little violino into a great orchestra. Ach, Fräulein, but you know. You, with the wunderbar charm, know. But you yourself are sad. 'Brother's' troubles have been too much for you?"

Katharine smiled to herself.

"Poor 'brother'!" she thought. "I am letting him be held responsible for all my sadness."

Willy Tonedale was the only one who did not think Ronald entirely responsible for Katharine's altered manner. He questioned her about Clifford Thornton, and could get nothing from her in the way of confidence. He found her reading weird books about dreams, their meaning and their relationship to normal consciousness. She spent long hours over that subject, and could make nothing of it.

"I did not know you went in for this sort of game, Kath," he said one day.

"Oh, I do not go in for it," she said, with a slight laugh. "But I was curious to see what had been written about it. The books are disappointing. They record such trivial incidents."

Willy looked at her uneasily.

"I believe you are going to become a scholar as well as a business woman, Kath," he said.

He shook his head. He seemed to think that she was in a very bad way.

A few days afterwards he found her studying a scientific book, "Outlines of Organic Chemistry." It was true that she had it upside down; but, as he remarked, that only added to the abstruseness of the subject.

"Good heavens, Kath!" he said, as he took up the book gingerly, treating it as if it were an explosive, "what on earth have you got here? Didn't know you went in for chemistry too. What in the name of all the Caesars does an asymmetric atom of carbon mean? I never heard of the beasty before."

"Nor did I," answered Katharine, with a hopeless smile. That book had really been too much for her. Yet she loved to have it. It was only one of the many scientific books she had been buying since she returned from Norway. Willy saw them on the shelf. They were nearly all lives of great chemists, or handbooks on chemistry. He examined them one by one, and then turned to her.

"Kath," he said gently, "don't forget that you trusted me before."