"I won't have it!" she muttered, emphatically, without knowing definitely what she meant, and struck an angry discord.
Through her playing reached her suddenly that merry harness-jingle of the afternoon, approaching, passing, fading away.
"There they go—to the beach for the second time to-day—to look at the ocean by light of the moon."
When in little less than an hour she heard the breaking again, on the quiet air, of the fatuous silvery jingle, she let her playing fall to a mere musical murmur, and listened, acutely, burning all the while with shame.
"Go slowly, Humphrey," she caught, in a rich, sweet voice; "I want to listen to the music."
"She plays really wonderfully. I have never heard playing I preferred to hers," came in a well-known deeper voice, at which Chloris's cheeks waxed hotter still. She pressed her foot on the pedal and shut herself within a wall of dinning, buzzing sound.
When she had lifted it, and risen, the road was empty, the night silent, but for the crickets and the distant surf, as the grave.
Several days passed, each bringing Chloris its very natural request from Damon that she would go with him to pay her respects to the new neighbors; but with a perversity that surprised herself more livelily than him, she daily found a bad reason for putting off the duty. This hindered the progress of the idyl; for Damon had a delicate conscience where these strangers were concerned; he would not see them bored in a latitude whose honor, as an earlier inhabitant, he appeared to have at heart.
And presently the atmosphere of the whole country-side seemed qualified by the presence of this Cytherea. It seemed to Chloris one could not escape the effect of her, without taking to the deepest of the woods. She was like an unstopped jar of some powerful essence; the little country world was redolent of her.