“When so beautiful a little lady as you invites me to play, how dare I refuse?” he answered gallantly.
Then he seated himself at the piano, just as Barclay himself and Davie Drake came quietly in and sat down in a far-off corner.
Was that music, or was it magic? That was the question that Mrs. Stuart could not help asking herself as she sat in her chair enchanted, enthralled.
Never in all her little life had Phœbe heard such music. Her face was a study—the earnest glance, the round eyes, the half-parted lips, she looked like beauty bewitched.
Meanwhile the melody and harmony flowed on, sometimes ineffably sweet, and tender as tears, sometimes bold, ringing, defiant, and clear, anon plaintive and low, and dying away at last in cadence that none who had listened to it could ever forget.
There were real tears in Mrs. Stuart’s eyes as she extended her hand to Antonio.
“We can never thank you enough for that,” she said.
Curiously enough there were tears in Antonio’s eyes too. Ay, even in the glass one; for tears, you know, are not secreted by the eyes themselves, but by glands around them.
“What did you play?” said Barclay, coming forward eagerly.
“Nothing,” was the modest reply. “No, nothing. All I have played was mere impromptu.”