"Swear you'll never tell any one what I've said, Kit—about the engagement or anything else."
Kitty promised solemnly.
"Not even Len," insisted Rosanne.
"Not even Len. But, oh, Nan, I shall pray that it will all come right!"
"Prayers are no good," said Rosanne, with abrupt bitterness. "God knows I've given them a fair chance!"
"Darling, one never knows when a prayer may be answered, but it will be—sometime."
Rosanne began suddenly to talk of something else, and the strange incident ended; for when Rosanne wished to drop a subject she dropped it, and put her foot on it in such a way that it could not be picked up again. Besides, this was scarcely one on which Kitty, however much she desired to help, could press her friend. So she did the wisest thing she could think of under the circumstances—made the girl go indoors to the piano and play to her. She knew that Rosanne gave, and was given to, by music in a way that is only possible to deep, inarticulate natures such as possess the musician's gift. One had only to listen to her music, thought Kitty, to know that there were depths in her that no woman would ever fathom, though a man might, some day. Denis Harlenden might—if she would let him.
Listening, as she lay in her hammock, to the wild, strange chords flung from under Rosanne's fingers, and again the plaintive, tender notes that stole out like wounded birds and fluttered away on broken wings to the sunlight, Kitty realized that she was an ear-witness to the interpretation of a soul's pain. Though she had never heard of Jean Paul Richter's plaint to music—"Thou speakest to me of those things which in all my endless days I have found not, nor shall find"—something of the torment embodied in those exquisitely bitter words came to her through Rosanne's music, and she was able to realize some tithe of what the girl was suffering.
Yet, in the end, Rosanne came out of the drawing-room with the shadows gone from her face and all the old mocking, glancing life back in it. If she had given of her torment to music, music, whether for good or ill, had restored to her the vivid and delicate power which made up her strangely forceful personality. She was hurriedly drawing on her gloves.
"I've just remembered the Chilvers' dinner-party tonight and must fly. You know how Molly Chilvers nags if one is late for her dull old banquets."