"I have not written a song of that name; I never write ballads," said the musician, crushingly, as he opened the piano.
"Something stormy, please," said Lady Joan, carelessly; "it is so hot that if you played anything sentimental I think it might affect even my unmusical nerves."
"Something of your own," said Norah. They were the first words she had spoken, and the musician glanced nervously in her direction.
He sat down and played the song he had just written, and hummed the words to show how it went. They were taken from the "Shaving of Shagpat," and the music was full of the reckless passion and meaning of the original.
"Whether we die or we live,
Matters it now no more;
Life hath naught further to give;
Love is its crown and its core;
Come to us either, we're rife,—
Death or life!
"Death can take not away,
Darkness and light are the same;
We are beyond the pale ray,
Wrapt in a rosier flame;
Welcome which will to our breath,—
Life or Death!"
When he began to play, all the stormy and conflicting feelings of the last few hours passed through his mind, and he was seized with the grimness and humor of the situation in which he found himself, and he played better than either of the two women, who were so strangely woven into his life, had ever heard him play before. When he reached the second verse he stopped humming the words, though none of them noticed it; and when he came to the end no one spoke for some seconds.
The musician was thinking that he knew now which one he wanted to marry, and that it did not matter if his love affairs went wrong so long as there was music to be made.
Lady Joan went on with her shawl, and reflected that if she lived to be a hundred she should never understand musical people or their ways.
Norah lay with her brown eyes full of tears, and she was thinking that love was the strongest thing in the world, for it could outlive its ideals.