tortured,
too, by all the introspection of this later day.

Margaret listened, rather breathlessly, with the excitement of an
explorer before whom is spread the plain of an undiscovered continent.
The painters she knew spoke of their art technically, and this
imaginative appreciation was new to her. She was horribly fascinated
by the personality that imbued these elaborate sentences. Haddo's eyes
were fixed upon hers, and she responded to his words like a delicate
instrument made for recording the beatings of the heart. She felt an
extraordinary languor. At last he stopped. Margaret neither moved nor
spoke. She might have been under a spell. It seemed to her that she had
no power in her limbs.

'I want to do something for you in return for what you have done for me,'
he said.

He stood up and went to the piano.

'Sit in this chair,' he said.

She did not dream of disobeying. He began to play. Margaret was hardly
surprised that he played marvellously. Yet it was almost incredible that
those fat, large hands should have such a tenderness of touch. His
fingers caressed the notes with a peculiar suavity, and he drew out of
the piano effects which she had scarcely thought possible. He seemed to
put into the notes a troubling, ambiguous passion, and the instrument had
the tremulous emotion of a human being. It was strange and terrifying.
She was vaguely familiar with the music to which she listened; but there
was in it, under his fingers, an exotic savour that made it harmonious
with all that he had said that afternoon. His memory was indeed
astonishing. He had an infinite tact to know the feeling that occupied
Margaret's heart, and what he chose seemed to be exactly that which at
the moment she imperatively needed. Then he began to play things she did
not know. It was music the like of which she had never heard, barbaric,
with a plaintive weirdness that brought to her fancy the moonlit nights
of desert places, with palm trees mute in the windless air, and tawny
distances. She seemed to know tortuous narrow streets, white houses of
silence with strange moon-shadows, and the glow of yellow light within,
and the tinkling of uncouth instruments, and the acrid scents of Eastern
perfumes. It was like a procession passing through her mind of persons
who were not human, yet existed mysteriously, with a life of vampires.
Mona Lisa and Saint John the Baptist, Bacchus and the mother of Mary,
went with enigmatic motions. But the