Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Don-a-dreams.djvu/119

 single notes, and was lost in a polite applause that thanked her with admiring comment. "How well she plays!" "She has such excellent technique, don't you think so?" "My favourite nocturne."

Miss Kimball had been watching the changes of his face. She asked, "Do you like Chopin?"

He looked up at the piano, transparently pale, his eyes burning; and he replied—without altogether understanding what she had asked—"I don't . . . know him."

The whole evening was a repetition in variations of that situation. Although he did not watch Conroy and Margaret, his mind was secretly with them. He listened to Miss Kimball and replied to her without betraying more than a heavy simplicity; and he remained impenetrable to her curiosity in a way that first piqued and then bored her. When she rose and left him, Mrs. Richardson took the chair beside him, and inquired for his aunt and his mother, and tried to rally him with smiles. She had been noticing the way in which Margaret devoted herself to his cousin; she had been feeling some remorse for her summary interdiction of Don's correspondence; and she began to look at him, now, with the sympathy of a mother who sees her daughter playing the coquette. But she was surprised to find him stolidly unruffled; when she caught him with his eyes on Margaret, she could find no trace of jealousy in his look; and she was puzzled, as much as Miss Kimball had been, to see him, more than once, gaze around the room with a sort of