Father Mostyn's eyebrows arched.
"The musical line!" he exclaimed. "The musical line drawn through Ullbrig! Geography upheaved! Mercator confounded! One might just as well expect the equator. And yet ... I felt convinced ... a disciple of art. You can't mistake it. But in Ullbrig. Is it possible?"
He wagged the staff in his hands to appreciative wonder, waltzing back and forth over three paces as though he were performing the first steps of a minuet.
"A singer?" he said, with a beaming eye of discovery. "Surely.... You have the singer's eyes."
"Alas!" said the Spawer. "I have not the singer's voice."
The gaze of the Vicar went suddenly thin.
"But the eyes!" he said; and then, with a quick readjustment of vision: "At least ... there can be no doubt.... An executant? You play?"
The Spawer sighed.
"Yes," he admitted, with smiling resignation. "I suppose I play."
"The piano, of course?" Father Mostyn conjectured, taking assent for granted. "Ha! ..." His face melted in smiles, like golden butter, to rapt appreciation at the vista of glorious possibilities that the instrument conjured up before him. He lingered over the contemplation down a long-drawn, eloquent "M-m-m-m," gazing out upon the infinite plains of melody with a brightened eye. "You are not relying on our aboriginal stone age pianos, of course," he said, recalling his eye to the actual, with a sudden recollective jerk.