to turn the pages of her music while she played. She was poised on the duet-bench with a slender grace of figure that was heart-shaking. In a strange duality of consciousness, Don bent above her, with Conroy, devotedly, at the same time that he heard Miss Kimball and replied to her.
"I beg your pardon?"
Miss Kimball, after a calculated pause, repeated: "How do you like Professor Cotton?"
But the first notes of the piano, running in a quick melody tenderly, caught and tangled his attention; and after stammering distractedly, "I—I don't" he relapsed into the silence which had fallen on the room; and gazing at the carpet between his feet, he listened to the music, smiling, as if it had been a voice.
He did not know what the composition was, or who had written it; and he was not curious to know. It was magically hers; and it spoke to him of her in the rise and fall of a melody that hung and trembled and rose plaintively above the rocking chords of a flowing bass. It was to him a divine yearning, an almost tearful aspiration; and it raised in him confused thoughts of darkness and love, of mystery and sadness and the unappeasable cry of affection—thoughts that were less thoughts than pensive emotions, vibratory moods that stirred in response to the singing of the instrument, and trembled in him till it seemed to him that his very soul thrilled and was shaken.
It faded away in a fluttering and soft appeal of
