That was the hour of joy for Nancy's heart. The concerts themselves turned her into a statue of terror, enveloped her with fear as with a sheet of ice. While Anne-Marie played, swaying slightly like a flower in a breeze, her spirit carried away on the wing of her own music, Nancy sat in the audience petrified and blenched, her hands tightly interlaced, her heart thumping dull and fast in her throat and in her ears. If the blue dream-light of Anne-Marie's eyes wandered round and found her, and rested on her face, Nancy would try to smile—a strained, panic-stricken smile, which made Anne-Marie, even while she was playing, feel inclined to laugh. Especially if she were at that moment performing something very difficult, spluttering fireworks by Bazzini, or a romping, breakneck bravura by Vieuxtemps, she would look fixedly at her mother, while an impish smile crept into her eyes, and her fingers rushed and scampered up and down the strings, and her bow swept and skimmed with the darting flight of a swallow.
Nancy, watching her and trying, with ashen lips, to respond to her smile, would say to herself: "She will stop suddenly! She will forget. She cannot possibly remember all those thousands and thousands of notes. She will let her bow drop. The string will break. Something will happen! And if my heart goes on hammering like this, I shall fall down and die." But nothing happened, and she did not die, and the piece ended. And the applause crackled and crashed around them. And the concert ended, and soon they were alone together in the flower-filled, fragrant penumbra of the moving carriage.
"Are you happy, mother dear?"
"Yes, yes, yes! I am so happy, my own little girl!"
In the gentle month of May they went to London.
London! Nancy's father's home! London! Close to Hertfordshire, where Nancy had lived the first eight years of her life.
On board the Channel steamer Nancy, with beating heart, full of tenderness and awe, pointed out the white cliffs to Anne-Marie. "That is England."
"Yes," said Anne-Marie, "I know."
"You must love England, darling," said Nancy.