He gave them the gayest, wildest, most heartrending of Brahms’ Hungarian dances. When he ceased there was silence for a moment. Nina Severing turned so that the lamplight fell on her long lashes, sparkling a little with tears. She always cried a little at music which deserved to be called good, and she had never heard Morris play so well.
“Thank you, Morris,” said Bertha, less exuberantly than usual. “That’s a glorious thing—always rouses the gipsy in me. It’s so full of life and joy and ecstasy.”
“There is something curiously poignant underneath that ecstasy,” murmured Nina, partly to account for the sparkle on her eyelashes and partly to make it clear that Bertie did not by any means know all that there was to be known about Brahms.
“Thank you very much,” softly said Hazel, elliptical, after the fashion of the modern generation.
“It’s your turn again now. Please sing this,” he said, with an engaging mixture of supplication and command in his tone.
He had picked up one of the songs strewing the table, almost at random, but she took it without demur, and advanced to the piano. Under cover of the opening bars he moved straight to where Rosamund sat in the shadow.
His eyes sought hers, with a question in them. For a minute she remained quite still, her dark head bent. Then she raised it, and he saw that her eyes were blazing with intense excitement. “Oh it’s glorious,” she breathed, “to be able to play like that! It takes one right away from—all this.” She looked contemptuously at her surroundings.
“Do you care so very much?” he asked under his breath. “Is music all that to you?”
“But I’m not musical,” she said with defiant honesty. “It only makes me forget everything else.”
Understanding flashed into Morris’s expressive face. At the same instant Nina turned towards him with a sharp hissing sound of distress and a prolonged “Hush-sh—Morris.”