The door opened, and Professor Thornton was announced.
"Light of mine eyeballs," whispered Luigi, "he does not look gay, does he?"
"Mon Dieu!" whispered Gervais. "He belong to the country of fogs. He give me the sore-throats at once."
Katharine had risen to receive Clifford Thornton, and when he saw her he said gravely:
"But, surely I know you?"
"And I know you, surely," she answered, almost as gravely; and for a moment they stood looking at each other in silence, surrounded by the four musicians, each waiting with his instrument in his hands.
"Where have you met?" Ronald asked, turning first to Clifford and then to Katharine. "On your travels?"
"I do not know," they said together, and they still stood motionless, arrested of body and spirit.
"Well, now for the quartette," said the musicians, and they resined their bows and tuned up. It was their habit to go into raptures over their respective instruments; so that sighs of content, and mysterious expressions of admiration, were soon filling the air. Signor Luigi bending over his violoncello, kept crying out:
"Ah, per Bacco, what for a treasure! Light of mine eyeballs – light of mine eyeballs – maccaroni of my native land, what for a beautiful treasure!"
They laughed as they always did laugh over the merry little Italian, and were just settling down to Beethoven's Rasomoffsky Quartette, when Signor Luigi remembered the Pomeranian.
"Ah, ha," he said, "the adorable dog will howl – he must go – he or I must go. We will depart him prestissimo. He will come very, very near and mock us. I know him, the rogue! Ah, Signor Professor, many thanks, no use you trying to do it. It needs a grand genius like myself to depart that amiable animal."
"And now I think we are safe," he said when he had expelled the reluctant white Pomeranian and shut the door.
Then the voices and laughter were hushed, Herr Edelhart gave the sign, and the quartette began, led off by the low notes of the violoncello. Clifford Thornton and Katharine, sitting in different corners of the room, lost themselves in the wonderful regions which music, with a single wave of her magic wand, opens to every one desirous of entering.
"Behold my kingdom," she whispers, "wander unharmed in all directions – you will find the paths for yourselves – "
Clifford Thornton, with the war of conflicting emotions in his heart, entered and found the path of peace.
Katharine entered too, and trod unconsciously the path of noble discontent with self and circumstance.
"Ah, how one rests," thought the man.
"Ah, what an aimless, lonely life I've been leading," thought the woman. "No use to myself or any one – " The sounds died away, and the listeners came back from their distant wanderings. Katharine looked up and met the grave glance of the stranger.
He seemed to be asking her:
"Where did we meet, you and I?"
And her silent answer was:
"I cannot tell you, but I have known you always."
Two or three times during the next quartette, of Brahms, she was impelled to look in his direction, and saw him sitting alone at the other end of the room, in an isolation of frigid reserve, staring straight at her as over a vast, with that strange expression of inquiry on his thin drawn face. She was curiously stirred, curiously uneasy too. She was almost glad when the quartette was over and he rose to go.
He went up to the players and thanked them. Then he turned to Katharine.
"Good-bye," he said, and a ghost of a smile, which he repressed immediately, began to cross his face. "I have been trying to think – "
He broke off.
"Good-bye," he said, and he went to the door.
Ronald followed him out of the room, and every one was silent, until Signor Luigi made an elaborate gesticulation with his right forefinger, and finally landed it in the centre of his forehead.
"Signor is like me," he said, "just one leetle poco agitato in the brains."
Ronald came back after a few minutes and said:
"Well, now, he did not interfere with us much, did he? And I am sure the music rested him, poor fellow."
"For certain it should have given him pleasure," said Herr Edelhart, "for we played grand to-night. I was at my wunderbar best. Lieber Himmel, what a tone I make! We were all at our wunderbar best because of Fräulein's wunderbar charm."
"The Fatherland don't leave off admiring himselves!" whispered Gervais to Katharine.
"Gentlemen," said Ronald, "I believe this is an evening for '47 port. Are we in tune about it?"
"In perfect tune," they cried. "Bravissimo, 'brother'!" So in '47 port the three foreigners and Ronald toasted Katharine, who responded by drinking to the entente cordiale of all nations, and the long life and good health of the quartette.
"May it never be shut out like the adorable Pomeranian dog," she added, "and if in a moment of temporary aberration it is shut out, may it howl and howl like the Pomeranian until it is called in again!"
When they had all taken their leave, Katharine spoke affectionately of these faithful old comrades, and begged Ronald to let her at least help him to keep on the quartette which had been a pleasure to them both for so many years. And then, in her own frank way, without any preliminaries, she asked him about this stranger, Clifford Thornton, who had made a great impression on her. Ronald told her what was known of the tragedy of Mrs Thornton's sudden death, which had taken place after some disturbing scene of unhappiness between husband and wife.
"I admire the man," Ronald added. "It was an awfully sad position for him to be in, and he bore himself with fine dignity. And he did not leave his home. He stayed on quietly, living down and ignoring the gossip and talk of the neighbourhood."
Katharine was deeply interested.
"Poor fellow, poor fellow," she said. "He looks as if he had suffered."
She could not forget him. He penetrated into all her thoughts that night as she lay awake thinking about her plans for the future, about Ronald's new life in which she feared that she would have but little part, about her travels of the last three years, about the people she had met, talked with, liked, disliked. Her wandering mind came ever back to this one thought:
"We knew each other. But how – and where – and when?"
CHAPTER V
For a few months after Mrs Thornton died, Clifford Thornton and his boy had stayed quietly at home at "Falun." People in the neighbourhood were kind in their expressions and actions of sympathy, and repeatedly invited both father and son to their houses; but the Thorntons had always been so reserved, that no real intimacy had ever been possible with them. Professor Thornton had written to his old governess to come and stay with them, and but for her, it is difficult to imagine what these two desolate people would have done with themselves. Fröken Knudsgaard, generally called "Knutty," was a cheerful old soul, fully persuaded that the world was an excellent place to live and thrive in. She was Danish by birth, and the Danes, unlike the Norwegians, have a large supply of good spirits and the joie de vivre. She had lived a great many years in England and spoke English perfectly, with a slight foreign accent which was very engaging. Clifford loved her, and indeed he might well have done so; for she had taken entire charge of him when he was a little child, and had lavished on him all the kindness and affection of which her warm heart was capable. If in his great trouble he could have unburdened his heart to any one, it would have been to Knutty. But apart from the man's painful reticence, his own sense of chivalry made him shrink from confiding in one who could not be generous in her estimate of his dead wife's character. Marianne and Fröken Knudsgaard had never succeeded in making friends; and after one or two visits to Clifford's married