An achingly sweet voice, so rending in its sweetness as to corrode like an acid when she used it like this, as if all the frightening possibilities of her nature, for good or evil, could be molten in the furnace of her feeling, and pour out in that fine-spun thread of sound to purify or poison. She sang with such superb assurance that they all accepted it as the only rightness, only realising afterwards how she had changed words to her own purposes, and torn the heart out of the song to leave it the antithesis of what it was meant to be. As if she turned the coin of love to show hate engraven in an almost identical design.

  The silence was unnerving, but it did not unnerve her. She stood up, and the applause began, noisily and violently, with almost guilty fervour, to cover the pause which should not have been there. She laid down the guitar on the table.

  “It doesn’t sing properly for me. I’ll use my own tomorrow, if you don’t mind.” There was an empty chair behind the semi-circle of artists; she slid by them and took it, abdicating from public notice before they had stopped approving her, and giving them no acknowledgement.

  The incident was over before half of those present fully grasped that there had been an incident. But with the end of the applause the numbness wore off, and the shock reached them all.

  In the front row old Miss Southern, as innocent at seventy as she had been at seventeen, leaned anxiously to her neighbour. She had come to this course in the hope of hearing again “Early one morning.” “The Oak and the Ash.” “Barbara Allen,” and all the songs she had been taught at school – sometimes in bowdlerised versions! – and nobody could put anything over on her where the canon was concerned.

  “But she got it wrong,” she whispered. “It’s hair. ‘Black is the colour of my true-love’s hair.’ Do you think we ought to tell her?”

  “No!” hissed her neighbour, appalled. “For heavens’ sake!”

  “But perhaps she got it from one of these degraded variants, you know. I learned it at school. It’s ‘hair,’ not ‘heart.’ Shouldn’t we…?”

  Half the front row had heard this last agitated utterance. Professor Penrose came up off the small of his back with the agility of an ageing monkey, but without any appearance of haste or concern, and demonstrated his right to be in charge. His old voice had all the power and command it needed, and he, at seventy-five, was not innocent at all.

  “Well, I’ll admit I did issue a sort of challenge,” he said, scowling amiably round the half-circle of tense and quiet singers, “to our young friends here, and they certainly took it up. We’ll go into details to-morrow morning. All I’ll say now is that we’ve just had a very ingenious demonstration of one of the essentials of folk-song, and that is its ability to change and renew itself. Folk-music is organic. It adapts itself to answer the needs of expression of those whose natural music it is. Once it becomes static it has begun to die. One of its chief functions is to be the voice of the otherwise inarticulate, and don’t you forget it. As for you,” he said severely, wagging a finger at the Rossignol twins, who gazed back at him with benign smiles, “I’ll deal with you to-morrow. Toss a sophisticated little court-pastoral melody at me, would you, and hope for me to fall over my own feet telling you it isn’t a folk-song! Of course it’s a folksong! The people took what they wanted where they found it, as well as creating it for themselves, but don’t doubt it became truly theirs. From the court, was it? So was the carmognole! So was the Ça ira! Go collecting in the more rural parts of Bohemia, and you’ll find themes of Mozart sung to folk poems, and if you go back far enough you’ll find they were genuine folk-songs almost before Mozart was dead, and those who heard them carried from the distant towns and took them for their own use never knew or cared what seed they were cultivating. And don’t think you can faze an old hand like me by bouncing off into Auvergnat patois, either. I knew that lullaby before you were born.

  “All right, let’s break off there for to-night, and think over what we’ve heard. To-morrow I hope you won’t be afraid to disagree with me, there’s room here for a lot of different opinions. If you think ‘My lodging is on the cold ground’ can’t be a valid folk-song because the words are by John Gay, and have the ring of the theatre rather than the village, you stand up for your views. We probably shan’t come to any firm conclusions, but we might uncover some very interesting ideas. As well as hearing some very fine singing and playing, I may say, if they live up to to-night. And now let’s all adjourn to the small drawing-room for coffee.”

  And they went, swarming out of the great room and along the corridor, so bemused by his persuasive tongue that they were almost convinced nothing fiery and violent had ever passed between those two people now silently following. Just a clever bit of impromptu theatre, to show that folk-music was alive and adaptable to a human situation to-day, no less than two hundred years ago. All the same, there was something still quivering in the air, electric and disquieting; something that moved the left-handed Rossignol twin to murmur to the right-handed Rossignol twin, as they climbed the staircase:

  “Do you know, mon vieux, I think perhaps this week-end is going to be not so boring, after all.”

  She hadn’t reckoned fully with his ruthless ability to rid himself of unwanted company, and had supposed that if she hung back until all was quiet he would be swept into the small drawing-room and the coffee conversation by the crowd of eager fans that swarmed about him, enthusing, flattering and angling for position. But when she came to the turn of the stairs, alone, treading on the fringes of the distant clamour, he reached out from the folds of the velvet curtains and caught her by the arm, pulling her to a standstill face to face with him.

  “Liri, I want to talk to you.”

  His voice was taut and very low, his face flushed and dark and convulsed with pride. She tried to wrest her arm out of his grasp, and instinctively gave up the attempt, knowing she could not do it by force and he would not let her go.

  “I don’t want to talk to you. Let go my arm.”

  “Liri, don’t be like this, I tell you I’ve got to talk to you…”

  “You did talk to me,” she said through her teeth, “just now. You talked and I answered, and I’ve said all I’ve got to say to you. Now get away from me.”

  “I don’t believe it! If that’s all you’ve got to say to me, why did you come here at all?”

  “Why shouldn’t I?” she demanded fiercely. “I came as a student, like anybody else…”

  “That’s a lie,” he said bluntly. “You came because you knew I should be here, you must have, you couldn’t have known the course was on at all without knowing I was part of it. You followed me here. Why, if you’ve got nothing to say to me now you’re here?”

  “You!” she said, suddenly rigid with quiet fury. “You think the world goes round you. You think you can play what tricks you like, and no one has the right to kick. You wouldn’t know what I have against you, would you? Oh, no! Listen just once more, and then I never want to see you or hear your voice again. I’m finished with you! I don’t know you, I don’t want to know you, you mean nothing to me, and you never will mean anything again. Now take your hands off me.”

  “The devil I will, till you listen to me …”

  Lucifer blazed, and the answering fires burned up in Liri’s eyes. She would have liked to swing her free palm and hit him resoundingly in the face, but in the quietness where they were, and sharp above the still ferocity of their voices, it would have brought the curious running as surely as a pistol-shot. There were other ways. She stooped her head suddenly, and closed her teeth in his wrist.

  He never made a sound, but his startled muscles jerked, and in the instant of surprise when his grip relaxed she tore herself free, eluding the recovering lunge he made after her, and slipped away from him up the staircase.

  By one of the coffee-tables in the small drawing-room – they were just getting used to applying the term to an apartment about as large as a tithe-barn – Dickie Meurice had gathered his court about him, and was exerting himself to be at once king and court-jester. He, at least, was having a successful evening. Things were shaping up very nicely. He didn’t miss Liri’s entry, or fail to hug himself with satisfaction at sight of her high colour and burning eyes; but he let her alone. So far from having anything against her personally, he was just beginning to find her interesting. She might be a tigress, but she had looks and style; she made most of the girls look like mass-produced dolls. There might be a bonus in it for him if he could make certain that her separation from Lucifer was permanent.

  Lucien Galt came into the room with his usual long, arrogant step, his head up, his brows drawn together into a forbidding line. He crossed to the coffee-table and helped himself without a word or a look for anyone, and then stood balancing the cup in his hand and looking round until he found Liri, in a group surrounding Professor Penrose, in the far corner of the room. He watched her frowningly, attentively, without a thought for all the curious, covert glances fixed on him. It was like him not to bother to dissemble for them; the most offensive thing about him was that he made no concessions to his public. In Meurice’s catalogue of sins that was blasphemy.

  And, damn him, here came the girls, just the same! He could stand there and look through them as though they didn’t exist, and they came edging in on him like cats, purring and rubbing themselves against his knees. The Cope kid among the first of them, of course; she’d got it badly. Pale as death, tight as a bow-string, swallowing her desperate shyness in still more desperate bravery.

  “Mr. Galt, you were wonderful! I know you must be tired of hearing it, but I do mean it, I really do!”

  “Fabulous! I mean, that Irish song… I cried!”

  “I always listen to your broadcasts… I’ve got all your records. But to hear you live, that was just out of this world. Mr. Meurice, wasn’t he marvellous?”

  Dickie Meurice slid unobtrusively nearer, merging his own adorers into the rival group; that way, there was always a hope of annexing them all, or at least being credited with them all, when Lucifer lost his patience and swooped away, picking his feet fastidiously out of the syrup of their idolatry like a hawk ripping himself loose from birdlime. He was certain to do it, sooner or later.

  “He was indeed,” said Dickie sunnily, and smiled into Lucien’s frowning stare. “If anybody got the message tonight, he did!” The bright, hearty, extrovert voice pushed the small, private barb home, and felt it draw blood. “Nice performance, Lucien, boy, very nice.”

  “Yours?” said Lucien laconically. “Or mine?”

  “Now, now! No bitchery between colleagues, old boy.” His blue eyes, wide and hard and merciless as a child’s, fixed delightedly on Lucien’s lean brown wrist, the one that supported the coffee-cup. The oval of tiny, indented bruises, strung here and there with a bead of blood, marked the smooth skin with an interesting pattern of blue and purple. “Well, well!” sighed Meurice, shaking his blond head. “And I was always taught that eating people is wrong!”

  Lucien looked down at his own battle-scar, and raised his brows in sheer astonishment. He had felt nothing since she ran from him, and never even looked to see if she’d marked him. Observing the evidence, and hearing the small, indrawn breaths and the blank, brief silence, he would have hidden his wrist if he could, but it was too late for that. He let it sustain the sudden, avid weight of their curiosity, and looked over it at Dickie Meurice with a cool indifferent face.

  “Really? You must have quite a job reconciling that with the tone of your TV programme, I should think. The only time I watched it, it was pure cannibalism.”

  The circling girls shrank and gasped. They looked from Lucien’s stony composure to Dickie Meurice’s fair face, suddenly paling to bluish white, and as abruptly flushing into painful crimson. If there was one point on which he was sensitive, it was his programme. There was no parrying that straight stab with a joke, and the killing stroke didn’t come to him.

  “Except that some of the meat you were gritting your teeth on was carrion,” said Lucien with detachment, “so I suppose the term hardly applies.”

  He turned at leisure and laid down his cup, wasted a polite moment for any come-back, and hoisted an indifferent shoulder when none came. Without haste he walked away, weaving between the shifting groups of people; and Felicity Cope turned like a sleep-walker, and followed him.

  “I never invited him to be my guest,” said Meurice, collecting himself. “Maybe that colours the view.” And he offered them his quirky smile and intimate glance, and got a slightly embarrassed murmur of response; but it was too late to repair the damage, and he knew it. He had been discomfited before his loyal and scandalised fans, something no public personality can ever be expected to forgive. Something heroic would be needed to restore his authority.

  “Between you and me,” he said, his voice earnest, confidential and sad, “we have to forgive Lucien almost any crudity just now. God knows I wouldn’t want to score off the poor devil while he’s all knotted up the way he is over Liri. Don’t spread this, of course, but I think it’s as well if some of you know the facts. You can help to smooth the way if you understand what’s going on.” His tone was all warmth, consideration and kindness; and no one could do it better when the need arose. “You see,” he said, “up to a couple of weeks ago Lucien and Liri…”

  His voice sank to a solicitous whisper, drawing their heads together round him like swarming bees to their queen. He made an artistic job of it, and sighed at his own cleverness. “What a situation! And here we are over the week-end, stuck with it! No, don’t misunderstand if I let Lucien get away with murder just now. I figure he’s got more than enough on his mind, without my turning on him as well, just because he takes his soreness out on me. My shoulders are broad, I can take it.”

  They shifted and glowed, worshipping. They murmured that it was really big of him to look at it that way. They promised faithfully that they’d keep his confidence. And within minutes they were dropping off from the edge of his circle to spread the news.

  The girl with butterfly glasses peered through the brick-red fringe that came down to the bridge of her nose, and her short-sighted eyes glistened. She had relayed the tale four times already, and it got better every time. Her fellow-missionaries were circulating with equal fervour round the room, avoiding only the august vicinity of Edward and Audrey Arundale, whose position, among this largely under-twenty assembly, remained very much that of the headmaster and his wife, and effectively froze out gossip. The only other islands immune from this industrious dirt-washing were where Lucien Galt moved aloof, abstracted and tense, with Felicity faithful at his elbow, and where Liri Palmer sat withdrawn and alone. Every other soul in the room must be in the secret by now.

  “… madly in love,” said the girl breathlessly, “and then it all blew up in their faces, just two weeks ago. They had a terrible row. She broke it off, but he was just as mad with her. Well, you can imagine what a fight between those two would be like. So they parted, and they haven’t seen each other since, not until to-day. And now suddenly she turns up here, where he’s got an engagement for the weekend. Just as if she’s following him…”

  “How do you know all this?” asked Tossa sceptically.

  “Dickie told us. He knows them both well, he’s worked with them before. You can be sure it’s quite true. If you ask me, she’s come to make mischief if she can.”

  “She certainly didn’t seem to be in any conciliatory mood,” admitted Dominic, ”when she laid off just what she thought of him, to-night.”

  “She didn’t, did she?” Delighted eyes blinked behind the butterfly glasses and the curtain of hair. “It’s thrilling, really, because when you come to think of it, she actually threatened him! She said if she couldn’t have him, nobody should. And did you know? – they had some sort of a brush before they came in here. No, honestly, I’m not making it up! She bit him!”

  “Oh, go on!” said Tossa disbelievingly. “People don’t go round biting each other, not even the folk element.”

  “All right, if you don’t believe me, take a look at his left wrist. You’ll see the marks there, all right.” Her voice sank to a conspiratorial whisper, drunk with the pleasures of anticipation. “You don’t suppose she really came here to try to kill him, do you? I mean, she as good as said…”

  “No,” said Dominic flatly, “I don’t suppose any such thing. One minute you’re telling us she gave him the push, and the next that she’s carrying a torch for him, and will see him dead before she’ll let anybody else have him.‘’

  “Well, they could both be true, couldn’t they?” said the girl blithely, and went off to spread the news farther.

  “And the devil of it is,” said Tossa, looking after her with a considering frown, “that she could very well be right. They’re getting good value for their tuition fees this time, aren’t they?”

  “Now don’t you start!” protested Dominic. “Don’t forget this has all come from Dickie Meurice, and you said yourself he must hate Lucien, so what’s odd about his drumming up all the trouble he can for him? But it’s just a load of personal spite. It won’t come to anything.”

  The Arundales, dutifully circulating among their guests, were approaching this quiet corner by easy stages, the image of a successful, efficient, socially accomplished college head and his eminently suitable and satisfactory wife. “Now I ask you,” said Dominic, low-voiced, “how on earth could melodrama muscle in on any party of theirs? It would never get past the secretary’s office.”

  Half an hour later he was not quite so certain.

  The party broke up early. The warden had no way of ensuring that his houseful of young people would stay in their four-bedded rooms, even when he had got them there, but he could at least set a good example, and hope that they would take the hint and follow it. Felicity had already been detached unwillingly from Lucien Galt’s side and edged away to bed. A few of the older people had drifted off to their rooms, and more were on their way, pausing to nose along the library shelves for bedside books. The Arundales completed their tour of all the groups left in the drawing-room by half past ten, said a general good night, and strolled out along the gallery towards their own rooms. And so powerful was the compulsion of their authority that Lucien Galt, who happened to be with them at the time, fell in alongside and left with them, and half a dozen others wound up their conversations and followed.