him like a blow, yet did not interrupt, for more
than an instant, his admiration. He stood dumbly looking after her, at
her smooth and graceful movement, which had no sound but the rustling
of skirts, her footfalls being noiseless in the satin slippers she
wore.

Peyton was not now as impatient as he had been to depart. In fact, he
lost, in some measure, his sense of being in the act of departure.
What he felt was an inclination to look longer on this so unexpected
vision. She sat down at the spinet with her back towards him, and
somehow conveyed in her attitude that she thought him no longer in the
room. He felt a necessity for establishing the fact of his presence.

"Pardon me for addressing you," he said, with a diffidence new to him,
taking up the first pretext that came to mind, "but I fear your aunt
requires looking to. She behaves strangely."

"Oh," said Elizabeth, lightly, too wise to give him the importance of
pretending not to hear him, "she is subject to queer spells at times.
I thought you had gone."

She began to play the spinet, very quietly and unobtrusively, with an
absence of resentment, and with a seemingly unconscious indifference,
that gave him a paralyzing sense of nothingness.

Unpleasant as this feeling made his position, he felt the situation
become one from which it would be extremely awkward to flee. For the
first time since certain boyhood fits of bashfulness, he now
realized the aptness of that oft-read expression, "rooted to the
spot." That he should be thrown into this trance-like embarrassment,
this powerlessness of motion, this feeling of a schoolboy first
introduced to society, of a player caught by stage fright, was
intolerable.

When she had touched the keys gently a few times, he shook off
something of the spell that bound him, and moved to a spot whence he
could get a view of her face in profile. It had not an infinitesimal
trace of the storm that had driven him from the room a short time
before. It was entirely serene. There was on it no anger, no grief, no
reproach of self or of another, no scorn. There was pride, but only
the pride it normally wore; reserve, but only the reserve habitual to
a high-born girl in the presence of any but her familiars. It was hard
to believe her the woman who had been stirred to such tremendous wrath
a few minutes ago, by the disclosure that she had been deceived, her
love tricked and misplaced. Rather, it was hard to believe that the
scene o