them for delivery. She had
no great admiration of the sentimental Sicilian composer, she confessed,
yet she sang as if possessed by him. Had she, Patrick thought, been bent
upon charming Philip, she could not have thrown more fire into the notes.
And when she had done, after thrilling the room, there was a gesture in
her dismissal of the leaves displaying critical loftiness. Patrick
noticed it and said, with the thrill of her voice lingering in him: 'What
is it you do like? I should so like to know.'

She was answering when Captain Con came up to the piano and remarked in
an undertone to Patrick: 'How is it you hit on the song Adiante Adister
used to sing?'

Miss Mattock glanced at Philip. He had applauded her mechanically, and it
was not that circumstance which caused the second rush of scarlet over
her face. This time she could track it definitely to its origin. A
lover's favourite song is one that has been sung by his love. She
detected herself now in the full apprehension of the fact before she had
sung a bar: it had been a very dim fancy: and she denounced herself
guilty of the knowledge that she was giving pain by singing the stuff
fervidly, in the same breath that accused her of never feeling things at
the right moment vividly. The reminiscences of those pale intuitions made
them always affectingly vivid.

But what vanity in our emotional state in a great jarring world where we
are excused for continuing to seek our individual happiness only if we
ally it and subordinate it to the well being of our fellows! The
interjection was her customary specific for the cure of these little
tricks of her blood. Leaving her friend Miss Barrow at the piano, she
took a chair in a corner and said; 'Now, Mr. O'Donnell, you will hear the
music that moves me.'

'But it's not to be singing,' said Patrick. 'And how can you sing so
gloriously what you don't care for? It puzzles me completely.'

She assured him she was no enigma: she hushed to him to hear.

He dropped his underlip, keeping on the conversation with his eyes until
he was caught by the masterly playing of a sonata by the chief of the
poets of sound.

He was caught by it, but he took the close of the introductory section,
an allegro con brio, for the end, and she had to hush at him again, and
could not resist smiling at her lullaby to the prattler. Patrick smiled
in response. Exchanges of smiles upon an early acquaintance between two
young people are peeps through