Page:Lippincotts Monthly Magazine-39.djvu/595

Rh use the word 'strumming;' that's a coinage from the mint of your own modesty."

She half turned toward me, smiling. She had found the sheet she wanted, and had drawn it from the others; a soft lamp struck her profile, showing the pearly curve of one cheek, and bringing into winsome relief the tiny salience of one dark, upward eyelash. "Shall I play this, then?" she asked.

"By all means play it."

She seated herself at the piano immediately, as if with a childish pleasure in my sanction. "It is so new and yet so touching!" she exclaimed, while she opened the pages and spread them out on the rack before her. "There's a gleam of Chopin in it, now and then, and of Schubert, too . . you'll see what I mean, I'm sure." Then she peered at the initial leaf, and shook her head with humorous despair. "I can't pronounce the composer's name. It's made of a very Russian-looking mob of consonants. But there's nothing harsh in this lovely pensée fugitive, as he calls it. . . I know you'll agree with me."

She at once commenced to play, and with a taste and elegance for which all her previous performance had ill prepared me. The melody was fine and forcible in its grasp and finish; if I am not wrong, the composer of it has since won a secure fame. But, after some really brilliant execution, Millicent surprised me by a most delicate suavity and dreaminess of treatment. The theme had become one of longing and of cogent yet subdued fervor. She gave every sign of being equal to the remarkable meaning which the notes now conveyed. I had not imagined that she could play so well. The work had clearly taken hold of her as none other which I had heard her strive to express. I rose in a real enthusiasm as she approached what I knew to be the end of the whole delicious little idea. As she was striking the last minor chords I approached her, full of the warm praise which she had roused in me.

But suddenly her fingers wrought a clash of discords on the keys. She turned her face toward mine, very rapidly, and then withdrew it from my sight. But in that brief glimpse I had seen that she was unwontedly pale and that tears were streaming from her eyes. Instantly I hurried toward her.

"What is it?" I exclaimed. "Are you unwell? What does this mean?"

"Nothing—nothing!" she faltered. The next minute she had risen and had hurried away from me. I thought she was about to quit the room, but instead of doing so she sank into one of the chairs yards away from where I was now standing. . . A little later I heard from her a sound of weeping, and saw that she was pressing a handkerchief to her face with the plain suggestion of hard struggle against a rush of almost unconquerable emotion.

My heart began to beat; I felt myself growing dizzy; the control which I knew it would be madness for me to lose threatened desertion. Loving this woman as I did, it was unmanning pain for me to see her suffer and yet offer her no tribute of sympathy. . . But sympathy, with me, might foretoken a passionate disarray, an abandonment of prudence, which I would hereafter regret unspeakably.