ry evening, after dinner, Charlotte Stant played to him; seated
at the piano and requiring no music, she went through his "favourite
things"--and he had many favourites--with a facility that never failed,
or that failed but just enough to pick itself up at a touch from his
fitful voice. She could play anything, she could play everything--always
shockingly, she of course insisted, but always, by his own vague
measure, very much as if she might, slim, sinuous and strong, and
with practised passion, have been playing lawn-tennis or endlessly and
rhythmically waltzing. His love of music, unlike his other loves,
owned to vaguenesses, but while, on his comparatively shaded sofa, and
smoking, smoking, always smoking, in the great Fawns drawing-room as
everywhere, the cigars of his youth, rank with associations--while,
I say, he so listened to Charlotte's piano, where the score was ever
absent but, between the lighted candles, the picture distinct, the
vagueness spread itself about him like some boundless carpet, a surface
delightfully soft to the pressure of his interest. It was a manner of
passing the time that rather replaced conversation, but the air, at the
end, none the less, before they separated, had a way of seeming full
of the echoes of talk. They separated, in the hushed house, not quite
easily, yet not quite awkwardly either, with tapers that twinkled in the
large dark spaces, and for the most part so late that the last solemn
servant had been dismissed for the night.

Late as it was on a particular evening toward the end of October, there
had been a full word or two dropped into the still-stirring sea of other
voices--a word or two that affected our friend even at the moment, and
rather oddly, as louder and rounder than any previous sound; and then he
had lingered, under pretext of an opened window to be made secure, after
taking leave of his companion in the hall and watching her glimmer away
up the staircase. He had for himself another impulse than to go to bed;
picking up a hat in the hall, slipping his arms into a sleeveless cape
and lighting still another cigar, he turned out upon the terrace through
one of the long drawing-room windows and moved to and fro there for an
hour beneath the sharp autumn stars. It was where he had walked in the
afternoon sun with Fanny Assingham, and the sense of that other hour,
the sense of the suggestive woman herself, was before him again as, in
spite of all the previous degusta