Now, alone in the drawing-room, she sang song after song, and, unlike Lallie's songs as a rule, not one of them was sad.
"Because my love, my love has come to me,"
she carolled.
The melody--exulting, triumphant, a very pæan of rapture, young, glad, valorous--so entirely expressed Tony's own feeling that it drew him with irresistible force, and he went to her.
She did not pause in her song, but sang on with ever-increasing abandon; and Tony, leaning against the end of the piano and watching her, was hard put to it not to tell her there and then what she was to him.
But he was not given to act on the impulse of the moment, and even before the last glad notes had died away there came the old chilling consciousness of the disparity between them: a disparity not of age only, but of temperament. Tony was very humble-minded. On such rare occasions as he thought about himself at all he did not, like Sidney Ballinger, tell himself he "was not a bad fellow." He was only too conscious of his many defects and shortcomings. He hoped he did his best according to his lights, but he acknowledged that those lights were neither brilliant nor searching. And just as there was for Lallie something incongruous in the fact that he was a schoolmaster, so there was for himself something almost ridiculous in the fact that he, of all people in the world, should be hopelessly in love with one so elusive and so complex as was the lady of his dreams.
For just as no mortal on earth could ever be sure what Lallie would do next, Tony least of all: so she and the world in general had a habit of depending upon Tony Bevan and always expecting from him a certain kind of conduct. Nor were they ever disappointed.
"I wonder," said Lallie, looking across the piano at him, "whether you are half as glad to see me as I am to get back."
"Don't I look glad?"
"You always do that; but then, that might only be kindness and politeness on your part. I seem to have been away years."