She laughed, but into her mirth there crept, or was injected as the case may be, a note of wistfulness.
"In captivity," she repeated, slowly. "I am always in captivity."
With most men Paul was diffident and prone to silence, but something in his effete nature gave him confidence with women. He had been flattered into a sort of assurance that they found him irresistible. They thought him clairvoyantly sympathetic—and he was by the very over-refinement of his music and dream-fed temperament.
"The other evening when I left you, I went home and closed my eyes and sat alone—thinking of you," he told her. "To me all that is fine beyond words I try to translate into music. Where words—even poetry—fail, notes begin. So at the piano I tried to express something like a portrayal of you—to myself."
She seated herself on a stone bench while he stood looking down at her. Her head was for a moment bent and something in the droop of her shoulders intimated unhappiness.
"Does my improvising music about you offend?" He put the question very gently. "You know that I go to the piano as another man might go to his prayers."
She looked up and shook her head. Then she said softly. "Offend me? No, it makes me very proud.... I was just thinking of something else—that troubled me."
"Of what?" Into the two short words Paul Burton put such a sympathy as only voices of women and partly feminine men can express.
"Of the word you used just now ... captivity."
He seated himself at her side and his hand fell to the edge of the stone bench—where her own fingers lightly rested. The cool satiny touch of the hand his own encountered, which she made no effort to withdraw, affected him as though a clear and silvery note had sounded near him.