In the drawing-room the inevitable Miss Regan claimed his attention. Eleanor was playing Mendelssohn, and he would have liked to listen, but Olive was less original.
“You have never honored our five-o’clocks again,” she said, reproachfully.
He murmured that he was busy.
“That was the charm of your coming,” she reminded him. “One had the sensation of beguiling you to play truant. But I suppose the tea was bad. Nor would make it.”
“The tea was beautiful,” he said, smiling. “But aren’t we disturbing the music?”
“On the contrary. Nor is giving us ‘Lieder ohne Wörte,’ and we have to supply the words. I wonder what makes her play such old-fashioned school-girl things. Then it must have been the scones.”
He shook his head and pursed his lips, and the music flowed on like a lovely moonlit stream. He was drifting on the stream with Eleanor, as, in those far-off days of young romance, he had dreamed of lovers drifting. A mystic silver haze was shed from the moon that sailed softly through the lambent starry sky, the whisper of the wind among the trees and the quiet lapping of the water made a dulcet stillness that was punctuated by the passionate “jug-jug” of the nightingale; mysterious palaces of night glided along the banks behind dim gardens wafting drowsy odors. The thought shook him that the world held such lovers—lovers who were not brought together for a moment and hurled apart in the accidental whirl of society atoms, lovers whose lips were not eternally sundered, but lovers who were each other’s sunshine and moonlight and music, daily, nightly, perennially. He alone was doomed to eternal loneliness—nay, to that aggravated form of loneliness which is shared with a life-long partner.
“I came across your cynical friend the other day.”
He started, becoming conscious that his eyes were full of sweet, hopeless tears.
“Indeed,” he murmured automatically.