"He knows ... he knows...." she kept thinking. "He is telling me in this way that he knows...."
And she could not be sure whether she shrank from his knowing, or whether it was a relief to her.
There flashed silence. The exquisite, intolerable music ceased, went out like flame. The dead silence was like a darkness.
Then Sophy forced herself to speak.
"You are very great, Amaldi," she said uncertainly, her hand still over her eyes. "You ... you should give all your life to music."
He answered in a voice as strange as his look had been just now:
"All my life is not mine to give to music."
She could not think of any fitting response to this. Silence fell again. She broke it nervously by asking him to play more for her, "something not quite so despairing." She smiled as she said this, but Amaldi thought: "She knows now that I know." This gave him a feeling of curious satisfaction and relief. It seemed, somehow, the beginning of something, the beginning of a new phase in their relations. Hope had stirred in him. The future seemed to him vague yet promising like an uncharted sea.
He played for her an hour longer, all the music that she loved best.