“Quite. I could never make a great author now, and nothing less would content me.”
He smiled; there was something of the simplicity of a child about this matron. To be a great author one had but to wish it and to be unmarried. And he lingered about the piano a long time, discussing authors and authorship, and now and then hazarding a remark made expressly to bring the indignant fire into her eyes and some speech to her pretty lips piquant in its severity.
At last Lilian could bear it no longer; she rose and, with heightened color, and a dangerous light in her eyes, walked to the piano.
“Won’t you sing something, Annie?”
Her sister-in-law at once complied, and, before she had finished the first verse, Lilian had diverted the colonel’s attention from all but herself. The song ended, Annie rose, and, her cheeks still flushed with the excitement of playing her best, slipped into the cool conservatory, murmuring the last words of her song still softly to herself. She had not been there two minutes before George joined her.
“You don’t mind smoke, Annie, do you?”
“No; besides, I am going back into the drawing-room.”
“Don’t go yet. It is much nicer out here. And Harry has a quarrelsome fit on and would disgust you.”
That instantly checked her steps. Harry’s bursts of childish petulance were among her greatest trials. She turned with an impatient sigh again to the flowers.
“You played beautifully to-night, much better than you ever play for any of us.”