The silence in the room again seemed charged, and there was greater constraint in her voice when it was next heard:
“I had to play; you need not have listened.”
“I had to listen; you played loud—”
“I did not know I was playing loud. I may have been trying to drown other sounds,” she admitted.
“What other sounds?” His voice unexpectedly became inquisitorial: it was a frank thrust into the unknown.
“Discords—possibly.”
“What discords?” His thrust became deeper.
She turned her head quickly and looked at him; a quiver passed across her lips and in her eyes there was noble anguish.
But nothing so arrests our speech when we are tempted to betray hidden trouble as to find ourselves face to face with a kind of burnished, radiant happiness. Sensitive eyes not more quickly close before a blaze of sunlight than the shadowy soul shuts her gates upon the advancing Figure of Joy.
It was the whole familiar picture of him now—triumphantly painted in the harmonies of life, masterfully toned to subdue its discords—that drove her back into herself. When she spoke next, she had regained the self-control which under his unexpected attack she had come near losing; and her words issued from behind the closed gates—as through a crevice of the closed gates: