Page:The Portrait of a Lady (London, Macmillan & Co., 1881) Volume 1.djvu/237

 while Isabel sat down nearer the instrument. Suddenly the stranger stopped, with her hands on the keys, half-turning and looking over her shoulder at the girl. She was forty years old, and she was not pretty; but she had a delightful expression. "Excuse me," she said; "but are you the niece—the young American?"

"I am my aunt's niece," said Isabel, with naïveté.

The lady at the piano sat still a moment longer, looking over her shoulder with her charming smile.

"That's very well," she said, "we are compatriots."

And then she began to play.

"Ah, then she is not French," Isabel murmured; and as the opposite supposition had made her interesting, it might have seemed that this revelation would have diminished her effectiveness. But such was not the fact; for Isabel, as she listened to the music, found much stimulus to conjecture in the fact that an American should so strongly resemble a foreign woman.

Her companion played in the same manner as before, softly and solemnly, and while she played the shadows deepened in the room. The autumn twilight gathered in, and from her place Isabel could see the rain, which had now begun in earnest, washing the cold-looking lawn, and the wind shaking the great trees. At last, when the music had ceased, the lady got up, and, coming to her auditor, smiling, before Isabel had time to thank her again, said—

"I am very glad you have come back; I have heard a great deal about you."

Isabel thought her a very attractive person; but she nevertheless said, with a certain abruptness, in answer to this speech—

"From whom have you heard about me?"