'What shall I tell you?' says simple Dolly, greatly excited. 'We had such a pretty drawing-room, Robert, with harps on all the doors, and yellow sofas, and such a lovely, lovely view.' And Lady Sarah smiled at Dolly's enthusiasm, and asked Robert if he could stay to dinner.
'I shall be delighted,' says Robert, just like a man of the world. 'My grandmother has turned me out for the day.'
CHAPTER X.
A SNOW GARDEN.
For every shrub, and every blade of grass,
And every pointed thorn seemed wrought in glass;
In pearls and rubies rich the hawthorns show,
While through the ice the crimson berries glow ...
The spreading oak, the beech, and towering pine,
Glazed over, in the freezing æther shine;
The frighted birds the rattling branches shun,
That wave and glitter in the distant sun.
—Phillips.
Is it that evening or another that they were all assembled in the little bow-windowed drawing-room in Old Street listening to one of Rhoda's interminable 'pieces' that she learnt at her French school? And then came a quartette, but she broke down in the accompaniment, and George turned her off the music-stool.
The doors were open into John's inner room, from which came a last western gleam of light through the narrow windows, and beyond the medlar-tree. It would have been dark in the front room but for those western windows. In one of them sat Lady Sarah leaning back in John's old leathern chair, sitting and listening with her hands lying loosely crossed in her lap; as she listened to the youthful din of music and voices and the strumming piano and the laughter. She had come by Dolly's special request. Her presence was considered an honour by Mrs. Morgan, but an effort at the same time. In her endeavours to entertain her guest, Mrs. Morgan, bolt upright in another corner, had fallen asleep, and was nodding her head in this silent inner room. There was noise and to spare in the front room, people in the street outside stopped to listen to the music.
When George began to play it seemed another music altogether coming out of the old cracked yellow piano, smash, bang, crack, he flew at it, thumping the keys, missing half the notes, sometimes jumbling the accompaniment, but seizing the tune and spirit of the music with a genuine feeling that was irresistible.