“And I have such a headache,” he said. “I think I have had it two days, but was too excited to think about it. It went away altogether when I was playing. But it has come back in force!”
Karl rang the bell.
“Yes; you want a good rest,” he said; “you are tired without knowing it; you have been living on your nerves the last day or two. But anything worth doing is worth being tired over. Dear boy, I hope your headache is not really bad. Anyhow, you have done the thing worth doing. Don’t go out to-night. Go back home, and go to bed early.”
Martin shook his head, smiling.
“Ah, I won’t give up an hour of to-day for fifty headaches,” he said. “Besides, Stella and Lady Sunningdale leave to-morrow. My father was not at the concert, I suppose?”
“No; not that I know of.”
“I sent him a ticket, although I thought he would not come. He does not even approve of my wasting my time at the piano,” he added, with an irritability to which this horrible stabbing pain in his head contributed.
He drank his whiskey-and-soda with feverish thirst.
“And I had better have left that unsaid,” he remarked. “Now I shall go home, I think, and sleep off my headache before dinner. But I must just look at the platform once more.”
He ran up the steps, and looked round the empty hall. The lights were being extinguished, and gangway carpets being rolled up. The Steinway Grand still stood there, and he felt somehow as if he were saying good-bye to it.