“Next Saturday, Milly. If I am not here, you know where the key is. Stop and make yourself some tea.”
“If you’re away I’ll wait,” she answered. “I shan’t want any tea.”
He started her off, and trudged homeward with a sense of unaccountable relief. He felt stifled, vaguely troubled by the memory of the girl’s white face and pleading brown eyes. Then a nightingale sang to him. At once his mind was swept bare of all such thoughts. Once more the pine and the clover-scented air around him seemed quivering with strange and passionate music.
That night in the grounds of Lingford Grange the man stood like a statue, half invisible among the shadows. Only his face, wrung with emotion, gleamed pale through the darkness. Out from the window, ablaze with much illumination, out into the cool, still night came the wonderful music tugging at his heartstrings, sending the blood rushing through his veins at fever heat.
The song swelled and the music grew, and with it his impotence. Then came the end—the dying away of that long sustained, melodious note, the crash of chords on the piano, the buzz of applause, merging into conversation.
And all these things Strone heard, for Lingford Grange, with its magnificent front and groves of poplars, stood with its back sheer upon a country road, and the newly built music room almost overhung the pathway. He heard, and he listened for more. They would make her sing again! Soon a silence, the silence of expectation—a note or two upon the piano—and again her voice. More wonderful than ever. It was a fantasy of music, elusive, capricious, delightful. The song ended with the woman’s laughter. Strone groaned where he stood, under the rustling leaves. It was like an omen, a chill forewarning of his own certain fate.
Shadows passed backward and forward across the window, and Strone waited, drunk for the moment with his stupendous folly. The music had crept into his brain; a new force was alive within him. He stood there rigid, immovable.
“She will come to the window,” he said to himself.
And she came. He knew her at once, as she came slowly into sight, leaning on the arm of Colonel Devenhill. A diamond star burned in her hair, a great bunch of white roses were clustering loosely at her bosom. She walked straight to the window and looked out. The spirit of the song seemed still to linger in her face, her eyelids dropped a little, her lips were parted in the faintest of smiles! Against the lamplit background she formed perhaps the fairest image of a woman Strone had ever gazed upon. Her bare arms and neck shone like alabaster, her black net gown glittered all over with some marvelous trimming traced in a strange design about her skirt. She stood there looking out, and Strone lifted his eyes to hers. It was like fire flashing through the summer darkness. Then he heard her voice.
“How delicious this air is. Could I trouble you to fetch my fan, Colonel Devenhill? It is on the piano.”