and
perhaps more remarkable in that it involved keeping time with any tune
he played and reading at sight some uncommonly difficult passages.

It had taken Thursdale seven years to form this fine talent; but the
result justified the effort. At the crucial moment she had been
perfect: her way of greeting Miss Gaynor had made him regret that he had
announced his engagement by letter. It was an evasion that confessed a
difficulty; a deviation implying an obstacle, where, by common consent,
it was agreed to see none; it betrayed, in short, a lack of confidence
in the completeness of his method. It had been his pride never to put
himself in a position which had to be quitted, as it were, by the back
door; but here, as he perceived, the main portals would have opened
for him of their own accord. All this, and much more, he read in the
finished naturalness with which Mrs. Vervain had met Miss Gaynor. He
had never seen a better piece of work: there was no over-eagerness,
no suspicious warmth, above all (and this gave her art the grace of a
natural quality) there were none of those damnable implications whereby
a woman, in welcoming her friend's betrothed, may keep him on pins
and needles while she laps the lady in complacency. So masterly a
performance, indeed, hardly needed the offset of Miss Gaynor's door-step
words--"To be so kind to me, how she must have liked you!"--though he
caught himself wishing it lay within the bounds of fitness to transmit
them, as a final tribute, to the one woman he knew who was unfailingly
certain to enjoy a good thing. It was perhaps the one drawback to
his new situation that it might develop good things which it would be
impossible to hand on to Margaret Vervain.

The fact that he had made the mistake of underrating his friend's
powers, the consciousness that his writing must have betrayed his
distrust of her efficiency, seemed an added reason for turning down her
street instead of going on to the club. He would show her that he knew
how to value her; he would ask her to achieve with him a feat infinitely
rarer and more delicate than the one he had appeared to avoid.
Incidentally, he would also dispose of the interval of time before
dinner: ever since he had seen Miss Gaynor off, an hour earlier, on her
return journey to Buffalo, he had been wondering how he should put in
the rest of the afternoon. It was absurd, how he missed the girl....
Yes, that was it; the desire to talk about her was, af