"I should love to have you," she told him.
He asked permission to lower the lights, and stepping outside the door an instant, pressed the buttons that extinguished all but a very few of them. After he had done this he came back to the organ and detached the self-playing "arrangement" without comment, and seated himself at the console.
Laura lay back in a long chair close at hand. The moment was propitious. The artist's profile silhouetted itself against the shade of a light that burned at the side of the organ, and that gave light to the keyboard. And on this keyboard, full in the reflection, lay his long, slim hands. They were the only things that moved in the room, and the chords and bars of Mendelssohn's "Consolation" seemed, as he played, to flow, not from the instrument, but, like some invisible ether, from his finger-tips themselves.
"You hear," he said to Laura, "the effect of questions and answer in this. The questions are passionate and tumultuous and varied, but the answer is always the same, always calm and soothing and dignified."
She answered with a long breath, speaking just above a whisper:
"Oh, yes, yes, I understand."
He finished and turned towards her a moment. "Possibly not a very high order of art," he said; "a little too 'easy,' perhaps, like the Bougereau, but 'Consolation' should appeal very simply and directly, after all. Do you care for Beethoven?"
"I—I am afraid—" began Laura, but he had continued without waiting for her reply.
"You remember this? The 'Appassionata,' the F minor sonata just the second movement."
But when he had finished Laura begged him to continue.