I have not heard you play so splendidly
yet.'

She flushed all over. 'Then we will go on,' she said briefly.

So they plunged again into an Andante and Scherzo of Beethoven. How the
girl threw herself into it, bringing out the wailing love-song of the
Andante, the dainty tripping mirth of the Scherzo, in a way which set
every nerve in Langham vibrating! Yet the art of it was wholly
unconscious. The music was the mere natural voice of her inmost self. A
comparison full of excitement was going on in that self between her
first impressions of the man beside her, and her consciousness of him,
as he seemed to-night, human, sympathetic, kind. A blissful sense of a
mission filled the young silly soul. Like David, she was pitting herself
and her gift against those dark powers which may invade and paralyse a
life.

After the shouts of applause at the end had yielded to a burst of talk,
in the midst of which Lady Charlotte, with exquisite infelicity, might
have been heard laying down the law to Catherine as to how her sister's
remarkable musical powers might be best perfected, Langham turned to his
companion,--

'Do you know that for years I have enjoyed nothing so much as the music
of the last two days?'

His black eyes shone upon her, transfused with something infinitely soft
and friendly. She smiled. 'How little I imagined that first evening that
you cared for music!'

'Or about anything else worth caring for?' he asked her, laughing, but
with always that little melancholy note in the laugh.

'Oh, if you like,' she said, with a shrug of her white shoulders. 'I
believe you talked to Catherine the whole of the first evening, when you
weren't reading _Hamlet_ in the corner, about the arrangements for
women's education at Oxford.'

'Could I have found a more respectable subject?' he inquired of her.

'The adjective is excellent,' she said with a little face, as she put
her violin into its case. 'If I remember right, Catherine and I felt it
personal. None of us were ever educated, except in arithmetic, sewing,
English history, the Catechism, and _Paradise Lost_. I taught myself
French at seventeen, because one Moliere wrote plays in it, and German
because of Wagner. But they are _my_ French and _my_ German. I wouldn't
advise anybody else to steal them!'

Langham was silent, watching the movements of the girl's agile fingers.

'I wonder,' he said at last, slowly, 'when I shall play that Beethoven
again?'

'To-morrow