She turned back to her letters, and Arnim, taking advantage of her permission, hurried out of the room and upstairs.
Hildegarde's little boudoir was an inner room, divided off from the neighbouring apartment by a heavy Liberty curtain. Governed by he knew not what instinct or desire, he stepped softly across and, drawing the hangings a little on one side, remained a quiet, unobserved spectator of the peaceful scene.
Nora had left the Walküre and had plunged into the first act of Tristan und Isolde. She played it with inexperience and after her own ideas, which were perhaps not the most correct, but the face alone, with its youth, its eagerness, its enthusiasm, must have disarmed the most captious critic. And Wolff von Arnim was by no means captious at that moment. Though he was listening, he hardly realised what she was playing, too absorbed in the pure pleasure which the whole picture gave him to think of details. He knew, for instance, that her dress was simple and pretty, but he could not tell afterwards whether it was blue or green or pink, or of no colour at all; he knew that he had never before found so much charm in a woman's face, but he would have been hard put to to describe exactly wherein that charm lay, or whether her features were regular or otherwise. He simply received an impression—one that he found difficult to forget.
A lamp had been placed on the top of the piano, and by its light the bright, wide-open eyes and eager fingers were finding their way through the difficult score. The rest of the room had been left in shadow. Arnim knew where his cousin was lying, but he did not look in her direction—perhaps he did not even think of her, so far did she lie outside the picture on which his whole interest was centred; and when the music died into silence, her voice startled him by its very unexpectedness.
"Wolff, won't you come in now?" she said.
Was there pain or annoyance in her tone? Arnim could not be certain. The knowledge that she had seen him standing there was sufficiently disconcerting. When we are unobserved, we unconsciously drop the masks which the instinct of self-preservation forces us to assume in the presence even of our dearest, and our faces betray emotions or thoughts which we have, perhaps, not even acknowledged to ourselves. As he advanced into the room, Arnim wondered uncomfortably how much the invalid's quick eyes had seen and if there was, indeed, anything in his looks or action which could have wounded her.
"You must think my manners very bad," he said in English as he greeted Nora, "but I knew if I came in you would stop playing, and that would have disappointed me and annoyed Hildegarde. You see, I know my cousin's little foibles, and one is that she does not like being interrupted in anything. Is that not so, Hildegarde?"
"You are a privileged person," she answered with a gentle smile on her pale face. "Still, I am glad you let Nora—Miss Ingestre—finish. She plays well, don't you think?"
"Splendidly—considering," was the answer.
Nora looked up.