altered materially.
“You must forgive me,” he pleaded. “I thought that you understood; I thought that we were together amused; it was against my intention to offend you.”
She stopped and looked at a window full of carved bears and lions; various expressions contended in her face, but none of them were soft or sweet.
“You pardon me, do you not?” he went on, laying his fingers upon her arm, while beneath his heavy eyelids there crept a look which his family would have regarded as too good to be true.
She shook the hand off quickly with an apprehensive glance at their surroundings.
“I ask you ten thousand pardons,” he repeated; “what can I do to make you know my feeling is true?”
She bit her lip, and then a sudden thought occurred to her. Her anger took wings at once.
“Will you walk back to the hotel on the outside,” she asked seriously, looking up into his face.
He gave a quick movement of surprise, and then made his customary pause for decision.
“How drolly odd women are,” he murmured presently, “and you are so very oddly droll!”
“But will you do it?” she repeated insistently.
He took his cane and drew a line in the dust between two of the cement blocks of the sidewalk, and then he lifted his eyes to hers with a smile so sweet and bright, so liquidly warm and winning, that it metamorphosed him for the nonce into a rarely handsome man.
Few women are proof against such smiles, or the men who can produce them at will, and the remnants of Rosina’s wrath faded completely as she saw its dawning. It seemed futile to try to be cross with any one who had such magic in his face, and so she returned the glance in kind.
“And you will walk home on the outside, will you not?” she asked, quite secure as to his answer now.
He laughed lightly and turned to continue on their way.
“Of a surety not,” he said; “but we will be from now on very sympathique, and never so foolishly dispute once more.”
At the dinner-party that evening was the young American who was engaged to the girl at Smith College.
“I saw you walking with Von Ibn this afternoon,” he said to Rosina as they chanced together during the coffee-and-cigarette period.
“Where?” she asked. “I don’t remember seeing you anywhere.”
“No; he appeared to engross you pretty thoroughly. I feel that I ought to warn you.”
“What about?”
“He isn’t a bit popular.”
“Poor man!”
“None of the men ever have anything to do with him; you never see him with any one, and it’s odd, because he talks English awfully well.”
“What do you suppose they have against him?”
“Oh, nothing in particular, I guess, only they don’t like him. He isn’t interesting to any one.”
“Oh, there I beg to differ with you,” she said quickly; “I saw him speak to some one to-day who I am sure found him very interesting indeed.”
“Who was it?”
“Myself.”
Chapter Four
“HAVE you ever thought what is love and what is passion?”
It was the man who spoke as they leaned against the rail of that afternoon steamer which is scheduled to make port at the Quai by seven o’clock, at the Gare by seven-ten.
Rosina simply shook her head.
“I am going to tell you that,” he said, turning his dark gaze down upon the shadows in the wake behind them; “we part perhaps this night, and I have a fancy to talk of just that. Perhaps it will come that we never meet again, but when you love you will think of what I have say.”
“I never shall love,” she said thoughtfully.
He did not appear to hear her at all.
“It is as this,” he said, his eyes glowing into the tossing foam below: “many may love, and there may be very many loves; very few can know a passion, and they can know but one. You may love, and have it for one that is quite of another rank or all of another world, but one has a passion only for what one may hope for one’s own. Love, that is a feeling, a something of the heart,” – he touched his bosom as he spoke but never raised his eyes, – “what I may have known, – or you. But passion, that is only half a feeling, and the other half must be in some other, or if it be not there it must be of a force put there, because with passion there must be two, and one must find the other and possess the other; that other heart must be, and must be won, and be your own, and be your own all alone.” He paused a moment and took out his cigarette case, and contemplated it and put it back. She leaned on the rail and listened, undisturbed by the strength of his speech. In the few short hours of their acquaintance the breadth of mutual comprehension between them seemed to be widening at a ratio similar to the circles spread by a stone striking still water.
“I am going to speak to you in my tongue,” he went on presently, “I am going to explain what I say with my music. Will you think to understand?”
“I will try,” she told him simply.
“It is so easy there,” he said; “I think if I had but my violin I could tell you all things. Because in music is all things. You must have feel that yourself. Only I fear you must smile at my language – it is not so easy to place your soul on a strange tongue.”
“I shall not smile,” she reassured him, “I am deeply interested.”
“That is good of you,” he replied, raising his head to cast a briefly grateful glance at her, “if you may only really understand! For, just as there are all colors for the painter to use, so are there all of the same within music. There is from darkness far below the under bass to the dazzle of sun in the high over the treble, and in between there are gray, and rose, and rain, and twilight, so that with my bow I may make you all a sad picture between the clefs or a gay one of flowers blooming from G to upper C. And there is heat and cold there too, – one gasps in the F flat down low and one shivers at the needle frost above high C. And there are all feelings too. I may sing you to sleep, I may thunder you awake, I may even steal your heart forever while you think to only listen in pleasure.”
“Not my heart,” said Rosina decidedly.
“Ah, now it reminds me what I have begin to tell you,” he exclaimed, – “of love and of passion. I must get some music and teach you that. Do you know the ‘Souvenir’ of Vieuxtemps?” he asked her abruptly.
“The ‘Souvenir d’Amérique’?”
“No, no,” he said impatiently, “not one of those. ‘Le Souvenir’ it is. Not of anything. Just alone. If we were only to be of some together I would teach it to you; I have never teach any one, but I would trouble me to teach you that.”
Then
