His eyes sought Rosamund, who had been beside him at dinner.
She was sitting, very still, just outside the circle of light cast by the great standard lamp. Morris had already noticed her capacity for extreme stillness, oddly at variance with the restless questing spirit that looked out of her grey eyes, and certain vibrant tones of her singularly beautiful speaking-voice. Watching her motionless profile, Morris thought that the Slavonic type was strangely emphasized in the sharply defined moulding of the salient cheek-bones, sulkily closed lips, and straight black brows. Her skin was very white, and her brown hair thick and silky. Morris thought her very beautiful.
He wondered what her thoughts were, as she leant back in her low chair, immovable. Presently, with that sureness of intuition which is at once a pitfall and a safeguard, Morris perceived that she was listening—intently, with every fibre of her being drawn tense.
Hazel’s voice was a soprano of no great compass, well-trained, and with an indefinably pathetic quality which gave it charm, but the drawing-room ballads she had chosen to give them seemed to Morris trivial in the extreme. He had hardly been listening.
He wondered what Rosamund Grantham heard in the clear soft notes.
When Hazel had sung once or twice, and had received Nina Severing’s judicious comments with a sort of half-mocking deference that recalled her father’s manner, she turned to Morris.
“Now you’ll play to us, won’t you?” she appealed.
“Do,” cried Bertha heartily. “I haven’t heard you for years, Morris.”
“His execution has improved, of course,” remarked Nina, who was fond of discussing her son’s music in his own presence.
“Bodmin teaching is not all it might be,” was the retort of Morris, addressed to Mrs. Tregaskis. “I’ve had to do the best I can by myself.”