Page:The Old Countess (1927).pdf/157

 but insipid. Marthe, however, would ask nothing better than to play him all the night!'

'Oh, do go on all night!' laughed Jill. 'We'd ask nothing better, either, would we, Dick!'

'No,' said Dick, holding his foot across his knee and looking at Mademoiselle Ludérac; 'we wouldn't.'

'I play very little of César Franck for solo. You will not have to listen all night,' Mademoiselle Ludérac smiled at Jill. 'This is a voluntary for the organ; yet the harp will take it.'

It was, indeed, over all too soon, strange and lovely, like a fleeting glimpse of the fields of paradise—like paradise, Jill felt, seen through a veil of ice. Perhaps only so could one see it. 'Oh, that's best of all!' she cried.

'Do you know Gluck's' "Orféo"?' Mademoiselle Ludérac asked, while her fingers swept the magically singing, magically sighing strings. 'That is like heaven, too.'

'Oh, play it, do,' said Jill. 'I only know ''Ché faro. ' ''

'I will play that; first the Elysian fields, and then the lament of Orfeo for his lost Eurydice.'

Was it like heaven, Jill wondered, listening to the far-away, trance-like measure? She closed her eyes and seemed to float in dreams. Gliding fields of asphodel went past her, white mists and slowly dowing, silver streams. 'It's all too peaceful to be really happy,' thought Jill. 'It's like a dream, a beautiful dream; and one loves it, yet wants to wake out of it, too.'