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 sounded unhappy, not to say rude, though I was only trying to be agreeable. Miss Dick accentuated this last one by helping herself to potatoes in significant silence. "You can look at a picture oftener than you can read a book," I went on, addressing Gerald, "and oftener than you can listen to a piece of music."

"I daresay," he answered, and I resented his politeness. "Why can't he stand up for his own business?" I thought.

I glanced at Katherine, and wanted to say something pleasant to her, but that was apparently beyond my power. My solitary "No," in answer to her question about golf, had been the one word I had so far addressed to her. I relapsed into silence and did not speak again till dinner was over.

When we went to the drawing-room it looked as if we were going to have a musical evening, for Miss Dick sat down at the piano with all the air of a person opening a concert. She played an arrangement of something or other, by Thalberg. All Miss Dick's pieces were arrangements, except those that were fantasias, and it was a feature of them that the beginning of the end could be heard about a couple of pages off, in a series of frantic rushes and arpeggios. She played now with a fierce concentration on the task to be accomplished; her face getting redder as Thalberg became more surprising; her mouth screwed up slightly at the right corner, through which just the tip of her tongue was visible; her eyes glaring, devouring the sheet of music before her, at which every now and then she made a frantic grab with her left hand, to turn the page—she would never allow anybody to turn for her.

When she had struck the last note, to which she indeed gave an astonishing rap, there was a general sigh, as for a danger evaded.

"My dear, I don't know how you do it!" Mrs. Carroll murmured, almost as breathless as the performer.