To Carlota, even the expression of his face brought a certain sense of encouragement, as if he divined the strangeness that she felt among all these new faces. His dark hair was prematurely whitened like his wife’s, but she liked his lean, virile face, and keen, dark eyes. Even while his friends came and went beside him, he kept her there, asking her questions of her life in Italy.
“The Marchese has told me who you are—a glorious heritage. Mind you keep the pace, but don’t let them starve you.” His thin, strong hands gesticulated eagerly. “I know them. It was the same with me before I went over, success and more success and then—husks. Do you know the greatest thing that came to me from it all? My wife. We were married just before I left, and she went also, down in Serbia, where it was hell, you remember, nursing. I did not see her for four years, then her face came out of a gray cloud in a London hospital and I found the strength to live even to look at her. Don’t let them deceive you, my dear. There is nothing at all in this thing called life but love and ideals. Will you tell that fellow to come here, the one with the violin.”
The man stood by the piano, smiling at something the girl had just said as she turned from the keyboard. He bowed as Carlota gave her message, looked at her with his quizzical, half-closed eyes near-sightedly, and strolled to Phelps’s side. Presently he returned.
“I have to bring you back. He only wanted me to meet you.”
“I have been preaching your song of life,” Phelps said, drawing himself up in his chair with the quick, restless movement that spoke of pain-cramped muscles. “This is the spirit of Serbia and all burdened peoples, Dmitri Kavec. Betty saved his life, and he has retaliated by keeping me in a ferment of enthusiasm over his country in her birth-pangs. He is not as sardonic as he appears. It is a pose.”
Dmitri’s face flushed eagerly, a queer, shy deepening in color like an embarrassed boy.
“I never pose, Miss Trelango. My life is nothing, understand. I drop it overboard anywhere at all, but I had forgotten how to laugh or look at the sun, and Mrs. Phelps has shown it to me again, that is all. For her sake I put up with the abuse from this person here. Do you live down here?”
Carlota shook her head. Some one had taken the place of the girl at the piano, she could not see whom, but at the first low, minor chords, she was aware of a strange thrill of interest. Dmitri leaned back in the winged armchair next to Phelps and closed his eyes.
“Now we have some dream pictures,” he said softly.
Carlota lifted her head eagerly to catch a glimpse of the player. The other men in the studio, even Phelps himself, had all seemed to her like the Marchese and Jacobelli, middle-aged, sophisticated, impervious to romance or sentiment, tired of all emotion. But the boy at the piano was different. He seemed to have forgotten the people around him, and yet he led their fancy where he would with the magic of his melody and tone pictures.