“Well, I think all the better of her,” said Holles, brightly. “Perhaps I will work for her.”
Then he told Hilda he was passionately fond of music, and he asked her to play for him.
“I have never cared for anything so much as for music,” he said gently. “It always had a mysterious influence over me. Do you know, I believe it appeals to the best part of us. Sometimes when I’ve been in the back-country knocking about and not knowing where I was going next, a most painful yearning for music has come over me, and I have positively suffered from the deprivation. At moments like that, it is an awful thing to be cut off from all possibility of easing one’s longing.”
Hilda made no answer. She touched the key-board, and after hesitating, she played some dainty old French gavotte. She followed it up with a mazurka by Godard.
“Did you like that?” she asked.
Jesse’s face had fallen. He looked unsatisfied.
“Play me something sad now,” he said. “That is the music one cares for most, because it is the truest, I suppose.”
Her fingers wandered aimlessly over the notes.
“I don’t know that I can play anything sad to you,” she said quietly.
