rth didn't you make friends
with her at dinner?'

The husband made some irritable answer, and the wife laughed.

'Just like you!' she said, with a good humour which seemed to him solely
caused by the fact of his non-success with the beauty at table. 'You
always expect to kill at the first stroke. I mean to take her in tow. Go
and bring her here.'

Mr. Wynnstay sauntered off with as much dignity as his stature was
capable of. He found Rose tying up her music at one end of the piano,
while Langham was preparing to shut up the keyboard.

There was something appeasing in the girl's handsomeness. Mr. Wynnstay
laid down his airs, paid her various compliments, and led her off to
Lady Charlotte.

Langham stood by the piano, lost in a kind of miserable dream. Mrs.
Darcy fluttered up to him.

'Oh, Mr. Langham, you play so _beautifully_! Do play a solo!'

He subsided on to the music-bench obediently. On any ordinary occasion
tortures could not have induced him to perform in a room full of
strangers. He had far too lively and fastidious a sense of the futility
of the amateur.

But he played--what, he knew not. Nobody listened but Mrs. Darcy, who
sat lost in an armchair a little way off, her tiny foot beating time.
Rose stopped talking, started, tried to listen. But Lady Charlotte had
had enough music, and so had Mr. Longstaffe, who was endeavouring to
joke himself into the good graces of the Duke of Sedbergh's sister. The
din of conversation rose at the challenge of the piano, and Langham was
soon overcrowded.

Musically, it was perhaps as well, for the player's inward tumult was so
great, that what his hands did he hardly knew or cared. He felt himself
the greatest criminal unhung. Suddenly, through all that wilful mist of
epicurean feeling which had been enwrapping him, there had pierced a
sharp illumining beam from a girl's eyes aglow with joy, with hope, with
tenderness. In the name of Heaven, what had this growing degeneracy of
every moral muscle led him to now? What! smile and talk, and smile--and
be a villain all the time? What! encroach on a young life, like some
creeping parasitic growth, taking all, able to give nothing in
return--not even one genuine spark of genuine passion? Go philandering
on till a child of nineteen shows you her warm impulsive heart, play on
her imagination, on her pity, safe all the while in the reflection that
by the next day you will be far away, and her task and yours will be
alike to