She stopped.
"Do go on," he said, speaking low.
Suddenly Elizabeth saw that Edith was observing them.
"I suppose I shall have to forgive you," she said, in a voice clearly audible, "now that you are taking me to 'Siegfried.'"
And the very fact that she spoke aloud, so that Edith could hear, falsified, so she felt, the truth of her light speech. She knew he would not take it quite lightly, and she allowed him to put one construction on it, so that Edith might put another.
His eye quickened with the secret message he sent to her, and she did not refuse it.
"But it wasn't a bribe," said he with his lips. "I made the plan before I sinned. So play your intermezzo."
A week afterwards Elizabeth was walking up and down the long garden-path while the morning was yet dewy. She had awoke early on this day that she and Edith were going up to town to see the opera, woke with a sense of ecstatic joy in life, of intense and rapturous happiness. For the last week she had been living in a storm of emotion, that seemed not to come from within her, but from without, beating and buffeting her, but giving her, from time to time, serene and wonderful hours. She had wrestled with and worked over the transcript of "Siegfried" until she had made the music her own, and she seemed to have come into a heritage that was waiting ready for her to claim it. The passionate excitement of the true musician, with all its flow of flooding revelations, its stream of infinite rewards was hers; she had entered that kingdom which, to all except those few who can say "we musicians know," is but a beautiful cloudland and a place of bewildering mists. But now for her it had cleared; she had come into her own, and saw steadfastly what she had before but guessed at, of what she had heard but hints and seen images. Till now, with all her love of music, she had been but a speller of the mere words that made its language, knowing the words to be beautiful and feeling their nameless charm. But now it was as if the printed page of their poetry was open to her. There was meaning as well as beauty, coherence and romance in the sounds which had hitherto but suggested images to her.
The revelation had not come singly; the golden gates had not swung open of their own accord. Well, she knew the hand which for her had thrown them open, the wind that had dispersed the mists. She was in love, in love, as she had once said indifferently and disappointedly, with "a common man." Beyond any shadow of doubt it was that which had opened out the kingdom of music for her; thus quickened, her receptive nature had been enabled to receive. Hitherto she had been like a deaf man, vivid in imagination, to whom the magic of sound had been described. Her perceptions had been dormant; she had but felt the light as the bud of a folded flower may be imagined to feel it. Now she received it on expanded petals.