One day, when Mervyn had been hunting, and had come home tired, he desired her to give him some music in the evening. She took the opportunity of going over some fine old airs, which the exigencies of drawing-room display had prevented her from practising for some time. Presently she found him standing by her, his face softer than usual. ‘Where did you get that, Phœbe?’
‘It is Haydn’s. I learnt it just after Miss Fennimore came.’
‘Play it again; I have not heard it for years.’
She obeyed, and looked at him. He was shading his face with his hand, but he hardly spoke again all the rest of the evening.
Phœbe’s curiosity was roused, and she tried the effect of the air on her mother, whose great pleasure was her daughter’s music, since a piano had been moved into her dressing-room. But it awoke no association there, and ‘Thank you, my dear,’ was the only requital.
While the next evening she was wondering whether to volunteer it, Mervyn begged for it, and as she finished, asked, ‘What does old Gay say of my mother now?’
‘He thinks her decidedly better, and so I am sure she is. She has more appetite. She really ate the breast of a partridge to-day!’
‘He says nothing of a change?’
‘She could not bear the journey.’
‘It strikes me that she wants rousing. Shut up in a great lonely house like this, she has nothing cheerful to look at. She would be much better off at Brighton, or some of those places where she could see people from the windows, and have plenty of twaddling old dowager society.’