“You talk, Tommy, as if love were something terrible.”
“There are all things in it; I feel it, dad. It is life in a single draught. It frightens me.”
The child was standing with her face hidden behind her hands. Old Peter, always very bad at lying, stood silent, not knowing what consolation to concoct. The shadow passed, and Tommy’s laughing eyes looked out again.
“Haven’t you anything to do, dad—outside, I mean?”
“You want to get rid of me?”
“Well, I’ve nothing else to occupy me till the proofs come in. I’m going to practise, hard.”
“I think I’ll turn over my article on the Embankment,” said Peter.
“There’s one thing you all of you ought to be grateful to me for,” laughed Tommy, as she seated herself at the piano. “I do induce you all to take more fresh air than otherwise you would.”
Tommy, left alone, set herself to her task with the energy and thoroughness that were characteristic of her. Struggling with complicated scales, Tommy bent her eyes closer and closer over the pages of Czerny’s Exercises. Glancing up to turn a page, Tommy, to her surprise, met the eyes of a stranger. They were brown eyes, their expression sympathetic. Below them, looking golden with the sunlight falling on it, was a moustache and beard cut short in Vandyke fashion, not altogether hiding a pleasant mouth, about the corners of which lurked a smile.
“I beg your pardon,” said the stranger. “I knocked three times. Perhaps you did not hear me?”