She went to the piano at once. Alone among the old-fashioned house furnishings it was modern; an artist’s instrument, full-toned and responsive. Tregarvon sank into an armchair before the blazing logs and gave himself up to the quiet ecstasies of the music-lover. From the first her playing had stirred him as no other chamber-music ever had. For a time he knew that she was improvising; then there were gentle themes from Mendelssohn, shading one into another so deftly that he could never mark the changes. And at the last there was the Chopin nocturne.
While the closing chords of the night-song were still lingering in the air she came to sit in a chair at the opposite corner of the hearth.
“You played the Chopin for me; was that your way of telling me that I might come back some day, Richardia?” he asked quite humbly.
Her hands were clasped over one knee and her gaze was fixed upon the blue and yellow flames in the great fireplace, when she said softly: “You are very human—and very blind; so blind that you haven’t seen that I have had to fight for two—for myself no less than for you. And there have been times when—when I almost hated Elizabeth!”
The Tregarvon blood was not sluggish; at least, he had never found it so before; but for the moment he was like a man stricken suddenly dumb. Then the gift of speech came back, laboring as it could in the turmoil of new ecstasies.
“You had to fight for two; God help me, Richardia—if I had known that——”
She rose quickly and came to stand beside his chair.
“If you had known it, you would have been the strong one, Vance, dear. I know it; I knew it all the time; but I—was afraid—to trust—myself. You are not going away, now, are you?”
There was the sound of an opening and closing door and the stumping of the professor’s crutch on the bare floor of the hall. Tregarvon sprang up and took the small black-gowned figure in his arms.
“Going away?” he broke out passionately; “you couldn’t drive me away with an axe! I’m going to stay forever, and let you make a complete man of me. We’ll marry your father’s share of the Ocoee back to him, and together we’ll make a man of your brother. There are a million other things to say, but Hartridge is coming to look for his chauffeur and I must take him back to Highmount. Richardia—sweetheart!... If I don’t wreck the car on the way it will be a miracle.”