“Please play something else,” I said hastily. “Won’t you try this Suite of Corelli’s? I know it so well.”
“I am afraid my sister doesn’t know the accompaniment,” he answered, with a dubious look at Henrietta, who was rising from the piano.
Her bored manner had already told me that she looked on accompanying her brother as a task beneath her powers, and the thought struck me with paralyzing conviction that I ought to have asked her to play a solo. However, this was not the moment to rectify the error; Nugent was lingering over the putting away of his violin, with an obvious desire to play again.
“I suppose it would be too much to ask you to try it?” he said to me, after another glance at Henrietta’s unresponsive face.
“Perhaps if it was not very difficult I might be able——” I said, and checked myself, remembering the snub I had received on that very subject.
But now that I had admitted so much, Nugent held me to my word, and firmly proceeded to arrange the piano part on the desk for me.
“I don’t envy you, Miss Sarsfield,” remarked Henrietta, with a cold little laugh; “Nugent’s ideas of counting are excessively primitive.”
Decidedly Henrietta was annoyed.
“I am the class of savage who cannot count more than five,” he replied, addressing me; “but I do my best.”