er formal. Piers, with his indifferent
appetite, could do but scanty justice to the dainties offered him, and
the sense of luxury added a strangeness to his new relations with Mrs.
Hannaford and her daughter. Olga spoke of a Russian novel she had been
reading in a French translation, and was anxious to know whether it
represented life as Otway knew it in Russia. She evinced a wider
interest in several directions, emphasised--perhaps a little too
much--her inclination for earnest thought: was altogether a more
serious person than hitherto.

Afterwards, when they grouped themselves in the drawing-room, this
constraint fell away. Mrs. Hannaford dropped a remark which awakened
memories of their life together at Geneva, and Piers turned to her with
a bright look.

"You used to play in those days," he said, "and I've never heard you
touch a piano since."

There was one in the room. Olga glanced at it, and then smilingly at
her mother.

"My playing was so very primitive," said Mrs. Hannaford, with a laugh.

"I liked it."

"Because you were a boy then."

"Let me try to be a boy again. Play something you used to. One of those
bits from 'Tell,' which take me back to the lakes and the mountains
whenever I hear them."

Mrs. Hannaford rose, laughing as if ashamed; Olga lit the candles on
the piano.

"I shall have to play from memory--and a nice mess I shall make of it."

But memory served her for the passages of melody which Piers wished to
hear. He listened with deep pleasure, living again in the years when
everything he desired seemed a certainty of the future, depending only
on the flight of time, on his becoming "a man." He remembered his vivid
joy in the pleasures of the moment, the natural happiness now, and for
years, unknown to him. So long ago, it seemed; yet Mrs. Hannaford,
sitting at the piano, looked younger to him than in those days. And
Olga, whom as a girl of fourteen he had not much liked, thinking her
both conceited and dull, now was a very different person to him, a
woman who seemed to have only just revealed herself, asserting a power
of attraction he had never suspected in her. He found himself trying to
catch glimpses of her face at different angles, as she sat listening
abstractedly to the music.

When it was time to go, he took leave with reluctance. The talk had
grown very pleasantly familiar. Mrs. Hannaford said she hoped they
would often see him, and the hope had an echo in his own thoughts.