And as it happened this act did not prevent Paula from finding March. The tyrant who looked after her hair had given her an appointment that morning at ten. So, a little before that hour and just as March was finishing off his job, she came down, dressed for the street. She came into the drawing-room and with good-humored derision, smiled at him.
"I knew you'd come and do it," she told him.
"It isn't going to be so bad," he answered. "Moszkowski, Chaminade,—quite a little of Chopin for that matter,—will go pretty well on it."
"Did you bring my songs?" she asked.
From the chair that he had thrown his blouse upon, he produced a flat package neatly wrapped in brown paper. And as she went over to the window with it, tearing the wrappers away as she walked, he went back to his work at the piano.
"Don't do that," she said, as he struck a chord or two. "I can't read if you do." But almost instantly she added with a laugh, "Oh, all right, go ahead. I can't read this anyway. Why, it's frightful!" She came swiftly toward the piano and stood the big flat quires of score paper on the rack. "Show me how this goes," she commanded, but he pushed back a little with a gesture almost of fright.
"No," he protested sharply. "I can't. I can't begin to play that stuff."
She remained standing beside his shoulder, looking at the score.
"They're strange words," she said, and began reading them to herself, half aloud, haltingly.
"'Low hangs the moon. It rose late,
It is lagging—O I think it is heavy with love, with love.'"