“Yes, I know.”
“And how much do you love me?”
“I shall never be able to say how much.”
She took his hand, kissed it, pressed it to her heart, then asked him, with some confusion, if he liked grapes better than pears.
“You are so beautiful,” he replied.
“Not to-day,” she answered; “to-day I am quite dull. But you are handsome. I saw them looking at you on the boat. And I was proud—oh, so proud to think that you were mine.”
When they had finished their meal, she opened the piano and struck out some chords, which echoed with a kind of wail through the long corridors outside. The instrument was out of tune, and the strings seemed muffled.
“Something is inside,” she said.
They looked and discovered a few sheets of music which had slipped down upon the wires. The sheets were dusty, stained with age, blurred by damp, but one bore the name “Henriette” written in the corner in a large, defiant hand. Joining the fragments, they found it was an arrangement in manuscript of Poe's ballad, “Annabel Lee.”