Page:The Old Countess (1927).pdf/153



ILL had followed Mademoiselle Ludérac to the other end of the room. 'I shall sit here, to be near you while you play. A little place all to myself,' she said.

The room was L-shaped and in the alcove-like turn there was a small table set with daffodils. Jill drew a chair to it and sat down. From here she could see Mademoiselle Ludérac in profile and look down the long room to watch the effect of the music upon Madame de Lamouderie and Dick. They seemed suddenly a long way off; Dick sitting there and nursing his foot across his knee, and the figure of the old woman, ravaged, absurd, yet beautiful, leaning for—ward to look up at him.

Mademoiselle Ludérac was tuning the strings of her harp, her head laid against them, and Jill's eyes were drawn to a portrait that hung above the daffodils on the inner wall of the alcove. It was evidently an enlarged photograph, a three-quarter length of a little girl, tinted, and framed in an oval gilt frame. The child was dressed in the elaborate white muslins of the eighties; blue knots of ribbon perched on her shoulders, a blue sash around her waist, a blue bow tied on the summit of her head. Her golden hair was cut across her forehead and long golden curls, disposed, one felt, by a proud maternal hand, fell about her small