“No. Something serious—your own choice this time.”
It was “Unrequited Love,” from the opera Rigoletto, that he played, a rendition Josephine Stone was destined never to quite forget.
From the first tragic note the man before her seemed metamorphosed—seemed one with his exquisite violin; and, as the wailing, beseeching soul-cry of the rejected lover rose and fell, cried out in the volume of those notes the depths of its anguish, and tremulously swooned its everlasting despair, the player ceased for her to be Acey Smith, the piratical, sinister timber boss. He swayed before her fascinated gaze a beautiful disembodied spirit of melancholy calling to the subtlest deeps of her being. Once again, as on that memorable morning at the beach, the soul that looked out at her from those great, dark eyes was the soul of an untarnished boy—a soul brilliant and aspiring, no longer shackled to the clay of iniquity.
Unconscious she was that he drew nearer and nearer, a new light in his black, masterful eyes that was devouring, mesmeric. Unconscious she was in the spell of it that she had fluttered back on the divan—inert, a helpless thing, hopelessly enmeshed in the web of his romantic magnetism.
“Josephine!”
Bow and violin dropped heedlessly to the floor. He drew her hungrily to his arms, swept her from the divan, from her feet and up to him till her panting form was folded to his own.
“Josephine, Josephine, Josephine!”
His voice was low and hoarse with passion, his face close to hers.
Then: “Great God, what a cad I am!”