“Hi! did you say I was going to sing?” he asked.
“I said it was possible. A thousand pardons,” said this perfidious man, manœuvring into a better place.
Hugh drew a long breath, and with his arm in Edith’s stepped on to the edge of the balcony. Then he turned side-face to the crowd, unlinked his arm from hers, and took both her hands in his. He did not look out over the crowd; he looked at her. And he sang:
“Du meine Seele, du mein Herz.”
At the end there was dead silence, for he unloosed one of his hands and held it to the crowd.
“Good-night, friends,” he said in good, firm German; “and we are all going to sleep. Hush! Thank you.”
Then he took Edith’s arm again, and they went back to the waiting supper. The window, through which they had entered again, he had left wide open, but the only sound that came in was the movement of feet dispersing.
“And that was the best of all, Hughie!” said she.
Edith could not quite rise to the superficial heights of gaiety during their supper, but it was even more impossible for her to rise—or sink—to any tragic level. Some equable level was there; she neither feared what she had to tell, nor did she rise to it by any exaltation of spirit that commanded her to think that nothing mattered, when happiness shone like this. Life and death and sickness and health in her mind took their natural level; all of them were to her the commonplace of souls that lived; to every soul these things happened; they were all on the same plane, because they were so big.
Just as she had anticipated, Hugh took a cigarette with his coffee, and she watched the burning ash get nearer to his fingers. When it got quite close she would speak. At present it was half an inch off. So she still talked of that of which they had talked.